It’s around 11am on a seemingly ordinary Friday morning in suburban Barcelona and swimming instructor Jordi (Ruben de Eguia) is rounding off a swimming class for primary school children in the local municipal pool. He is obviously a popular and effective coach and the kids all seem to be having a great time. Come the end of the lesson, he clears up before heading off to the changing rooms to engage in some lewd banter with colleague Hector (Albert Ausellé). Jordi is obviously a rebel – he makes a point of smoking in the toilet simply to prove to straight-laced Hector that he can – and his homosexuality is at least an open secret. For Jordi and Hector it is an ordinary day, just as it is for manager Ana (Roser Batalla) and receptionist Laura (Diana Gómez). It is not going to stay that way for long.
By 3pm the pool is closed, the doors locked shut and notices are up to the effect that all operations are suspended until Monday. We bounce back slightly in time – to 2.10pm – to learn why this is so. This discontinuous narrative gets a bit confusing as director Ventura Pons plays around with the order in which the audience learns certain pieces of information, but it comes out that an allegation has been made that Jordi has sexually assaulted one of his pupils, a boy of about eight called Alex who was terrified of water.
We are taken through a sequence of intercalated scenes from two conversations, both involving self-confessed former hippy Ana. In the first she is in her office with the boy’s father (Santi Ricart); in the second she is in the changing room with Jordi who does himself no favours by treating the allegation as a joke before adopting a more aggressive-defensive stance. I should point out here that El Virus de la Por is entirely in Catalan with no English subtitles so there will be nuances and elements of the conversations that I have missed.
We get a hint of the way Alex’s father is thinking from a shot of their home life; from the family’s living room they can see a neighbour sitting by his window with a laptop and clearly pleasuring himself. “You can never close your eyes completely when you have a child to protect”, he tells Ana. Meanwhile Jordi, having admitted he kissed the boy, innocently, to congratulate him on his progress, pronounces the whole thing to be a matter of interpretation. To prove the point, he discards what little clothing he was wearing and stands before Ana: “If someone walked in now, how would they interpret this?”.
The camera work throughout these conversations varies between brilliant and awkward, almost as though cameraman Andalu Vila San Juan can’t decide whether he is a professional working on a serious piece of art or making a home movie. The close-up shots of Jordi in his bright orange robe against the intense blue changing room walls combined with de Eguia’s huge range of facial expressions create a kind of hyper-realistic effect in which the words are almost superfluous; on the other hand the over-the-shoulder technique adopted for the conversation between Ana and Alex’s father feels amateurish and uninteresting, especially when combined with an over-enthusiastic reliance on the Law of Thirds.
Somehow, and we don’t see quite how although the word “Facebook” is mentioned more than once, news of the allegation has got out. Not long after 3pm an angry mob starts to congregate outside, a rabble of self-righteous and depressingly homophobic individuals who have clearly judged Jordi to be guilty and are baying for his blood. This is where Gómez gets to bring her character to life: the lowliest of the pool’s staff and the last to find out what was happening, Laura finds herself at the front line with only the glass doors between her and the bricks which are raining down on them whilst her colleagues hide in the bowels of the building.
As the film comes to its end, it is clear that for Jordi – who by now has had his attitude terrified out of him – his descent into Hell is only just beginning. For his colleagues too, life is never going to be quite the same again.
El Virus de la Por leaves too many questions unanswered. We don’t for instance learn much about the “epidemiology” (to use a term with which we’ve all become too familiar of late) of the spread of the bad news. How did it spread so quickly? Who leaked it in the first place? Would Jordi have been treated differently if he had been heterosexual and his accuser a girl? In any case, for all the references to both his rebellious nature and his sexuality, Jordi just doesn’t feel like a credible suspect for such a heinous allegation.
What is El Virus de la Por doing in an online theatre festival? That question, thankfully, is answered in a short “the making of…” film which accompanies the film. It started life as a stage play entitled El Principi d’Arquimedes (Archimedes’ Principle) by Josep Maria Miró. Ventura Pons’ idea was to turn the play into a film, but using stage actors who had never made a film before and adding in scenes which couldn’t exist on stage such as the opening scene with the children in the large pool. Shots like the close-ups of Jordi’s face couldn’t be achieved on stage, and scenes such as Jordi smoking in the confined space of the toilet would have to be realised somewhat differently.
Is Pons trying to assert the superiority of film over stage here? He doesn’t claim to be doing so, and I think – at least I hope – that this is more of an exercise in “compare and contrast”. In any case I do not doubt that a good production of the play would elicit much more of an emotional response from an audience presented with what is, after all, extremely challenging subject matter than this rather rushed and confusingly-ordered film succeeds in doing.
Reviewer - Ian Simpson
on - 18/5/20
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