Film review: Alcarràs is at its best when it explores the human cost of capitalism

The family’s personal stories are set against a backdrop of familiar scenes of protests by angry farmers

★★★★☆

The lives of a family of Catalonia peach farmers are upended in Alcarràs (15A) when Pinyol (Jacob Diarte), who owns their land, announces his intention of converting the unprofitable orchards into a solar panel farm.

Eldest son Quimet (Jordi Pujol Dolcet) is outraged, and blames his father Rogelio (Josep Abad) for not having the foresight to sign a contract with Pinyol’s father, whose life Rogelio’s family saved during the Spanish Civil War and who afterwards granted Rogelio’s father licence to farm the land. 

Given a stay of execution until the final harvest is in, the family — including Quimet’s long-suffering wife Dolors (Anna Otin) and their teenage son Roger (Albert Bosch) and daughter Mariona (Xènia Roset) — set to work to harvest the peaches by hand, and quickly find that their previously strong family bond starts to crumble under the strain.

Written by Arnau Vilaró and Carla Simón, with Simón directing, Alcarràs is a universal tale — there are elements here of Ireland’s The Field, for example, or France’s Jean de Florette, in its elegy for the traditional devotion to the ‘solid ground, beloved land’.

Meanwhile, the family’s personal stories are set against a backdrop of by now familiar scenes of protests by angry farmers, who drag tractor-loads of peaches into the town centre and then destroy them rather than sell their produce at ruinous prices.

But while it works as a socio-economic allegory (which is all the more effective given that the landowner Pinyol seems to be a pretty decent sort who offers the family a reasonable living as curators of his solar panel farm), Alcarràs is at its best when it explores the human cost of capitalism, and particularly in the characters of Quimet, a kind of peach-farming Bull McCabe who finds himself staring down the barrel of a life lived for naught, and his elderly father Rogelio, the beloved Catalonian patriarch who has lost his strength, his moral authority and — with this latest blow — the will to live.

(cinema release)