There’s only two kinds of screen stories, a film critic once wrote; there’s the one about the ambitious character who wants to leave town and there’s the other one about the frustrated soul who turns up a stranger in a strange town (or land).
Crab Trap (El vuelco del cangrejo) is the second kind.
The setting is a remote and isolated village on the Columbian coast. Director Oscar Ruiz Navia isn’t desperate to make this location look pretty, because he doesn’t have to try. Shot in wide-screen in a tone designed to tune out loud colours, the camera often just sits on an image for a long time; like the pounding Pacific surf or a set of crystalline clouds or the sculptures in the brown beach sand, where the tide has moulded them into mysterious shapes.
Daniel (Rodrigo Vélez), a white man, absorbs all this with the inscrutable gaze of a guy who has gone on holiday by mistake. With his shaved head and a face both feminine and definitely male he has the look of a movie star. We never really find out why he turned up in this place, called La Barra, or who he is. He spends a lot of the movie wandering about like a particularly well-animated zombie and occasionally he makes enquiries about the possibility of getting a boat out (apparently this place is harder to leave than it is to arrive at).
Navia constructs a facile mystery around Daniel; he has a picture of a girl but he never talks about her; he has money that he doesn’t want to spend and he has a past that he hints at, but never truly gives up in his day-to-day human interaction. In other words he’s a glib tourist, sucking in the surroundings, his contribution to the local scene, miniscule, but his presence, ultimately, is disturbing to the delicate balance of the human ecology. The more he tries to disappear, the more his presence is deeply felt. He pals up with a lively school girl Lucia (Yisela Alverez) who becomes a kind of tour guide, flirts with local beauty Jazmin (Kaurent Hireotroza) and engages in cryptic dialogues with the tribal leader Cerebro (Arnobio Salazar Rivas). Daniel then, is a bit of a device, a dispassionate witness to the internal politics of the village and a larger drama gathering around it.
I’ve read that Crab Trap has what sounds like a strong dramatic situation. In the story there is a second white man Paisa (Jaime Andes Castano) who apparently wants to buy up the village for a tourist resort (he’s also having an affair with Jazmin). But this bit of plot is so muted in the film it seems unfair to emphasise it here; Crab Trap stylistically doesn’t have much to do with the conventional rhythms and construction of mainstream cinema at all. It’s got its own peculiar muse. I noticed that in the Spanish Film Festival guide the movie has been described as a quasi-documentary (the cast, apparently, are full of amateurs) and a piece of 'moody poetry’. But that kind of labelling sells the film short.
Crab Trap has an odd mystique that’s hard to describe and for a film that distrusts words that’s apt. Its images, like the actions of its indigenous cast, have real power.
