In a well-worn municipal swimming pool in Brazil, the handsome, popular 33-year-old instructor Rubens (a superb Daniel de Oliveira) takes one of his best pupils, Alex (Luiz Felipe Mello), aside to check in with him. 6-year-old Alex has been morose since the last swim meet where he came second in a race he, and his dourly pushy father Davi (Marco Ricca), expected to win. Alex has a tendency toward tearfulness — which has perhaps worsened since his clearly mutually loathing parents divorced — and so when Rubens leads him away to the locker room, he could just be kindly removing him from his teammates’ scornful view. Or he could be seeking out the one place in the building not covered by CCTV in order to touch the boy inappropriately, with, the story goes, a kiss on the lips. Carolina Jabor‘s surgically precise second feature, which played at the Transilvania International Film Festival having deservedly picked up several awards in Rio, derives a great deal of its power from what we can’t see, can’t know and can’t be sure of. And yet it does so in scenes of such defined, sharp-edged clarity, that it constantly teases the idea that an irreducible, absolute truth does exist. It’s just that it hovers a little outside the peripheral vision of even the most unblinking viewer.
The accusation itself is a case in point. We never hear it from Alex, but from his horrified mother Marisa (Stella Rabello), so the possibility exists that she misinterpreted Alex’s words, wilfully or otherwise, or that the clearly troubled Alex exaggerated a well-meant peck on the cheek (to which Rubens admits) for reasons perhaps even he doesn’t fully understand. But though we quickly come to believe that Rubens is not the pedophile he is branded as, just as quickly Jabor, working from Lucas Paraizo‘s clever, incisive script, casts doubt on his character in other ways. Affable and charming in front of the parents, in private conversations with his co-worker, Rubens reveals a different side, one that makes lewd comments (literal “locker-room talk”) about the prepubescent girls who hang around and Insta-friend him. And as quickly as our sympathies swing towards him when he righteously refuses to answer questions about his sexuality (the film subtly weaves in a skein of disgust at the tendency to conflate homosexuality with pedophilia), they swing away again when we meet his girlfriend and discover she’s only just turned 19. None of these vaguely icky transgressions mean that he is a child abuser, and for any of them the Brazilian culture of machismo is as much to blame as Rubens himself, but lack of guilt is not the same thing as innocence.
It’s in the muddying of Rubens’ moral waters that “Liquid Truth” most distinguishes itself from its nearest kin: Thomas Vinterberg‘s excellent “The Hunt.” While both films tell compelling stories of men vilified for crimes they did not commit, Jabor’s is less about that frustration than about the frighteningly plausible way a possible misapprehension can turn into quick, darting whispers which can be immediately amplified to a roar via social media, as when Marisa takes to the parents’ Facebook group. Suddenly, a few hesitant words are bouncing around the internet echo-chamber and crescendoing to an inescapable hubbub — perfectly evoked by Mekler and Thiago Nassif‘s woozy, subaquatic bloodrush of a score.
DP Azul Serra‘s crisp, desaturated handheld style feels coolly removed from the creeping hysteria it presents, but catches telling details: the graying grout between the pool’s tiles; the loaded looks exchanged between Marisa and Davi over their son’s head; Rubens’ tensed, muscled swimmer’s shoulders as he steels himself to go to work, straightening the lane dividers and tossing flotation aids into the pool like nothing’s wrong. With nuance constantly favored over high dramatics, an unresolved ending is perhaps to be expected, but it’s still a bit unsatisfying, like a dive that cuts away just before the splash, and leaves us unsure how to judge it. But then, perhaps that the most honest ending too: here, truth is not a solid but a liquid, and moreover, one diluted in thousands of gallons of ambiguity and ambivalence and hidden agendas. And, cloudy and toxic as the pool is clear and chlorinated, that is the water we swim in. [B+]