Writers: Jaume Claret Muxart and Meritxell Colell
Director: Jaume Claret Muxart
27-year-old Spanish director Jaume Claret Muxart has an old soul. His brooding coming-of-age story about a 16-year-old Spanish boy on a family cycling holiday in Germany feels steeped in the past despite being set in the present, and the close-ups of the lead actor’s face appear to pay homage to Bergman: and all is handsomely shot on 16mm.
Dídac’s parents don’t have enough money for a fancy holiday, and with his mother soon to appear in The Death of Empedocles back in a Spanish theatre, they have decided to take their three sons to Germany and cycle along the Danube. The opening shots of speeding bikes in the German countryside are exciting, but the rest of Muxart’s film is slow, sedate and meditative.
Their holiday is not free of tensions. Mònica blames her husband for their lack of finances, while one of her sons implies that she is selfish when, at every spare moment she has, she learns her lines for her upcoming performance. There’s a sense that Dídac doesn’t want to be there; perhaps he’d rather be hanging out with his friends. He fights and wrestles with his younger brother Biel, who realises that he’s losing Dídac to adulthood. The youngest brother Guiu is delightful, but a handful at night and his parents worry that his shouts will disturb the other campers at the campsites where they overnight.
One of the campsites seems improbably cruisy as men criss-cross the area outside the latrines once the sun has set. One young man begins to follow Dídac, but in a dreamlike sequence, he spies his mother there too. When she was 16, she too cycled along the Danube and fell in love for the first time. Will history repeat itself?
The mysterious boy keeps popping up as the family visits postwar architecture along the Danube. On one trip to Max Bill’s Ulm School of Design, Dídac’s father plays the piano, and for a while Dídac joins him before he is lured away again by the boy he’s finding hard to resist. Biel sets off in pursuit, perhaps having a sexual awakening of his own or sad that he’s cast alone in childhood.
Unpredictable and elegiac, Strange River certainly lives up to its name, and there is a familiar ache in Jan Monter’s performance as Dídac, drawn to heartbreak as surely as the Danube flows into the sea. Nausicaa Bonnin plays the mother who has to deal with her own shortcomings and those of her husband (Jordi Oriol), who chatters on about the utopian aims of Modernism and social housing. Only once do we see him battling his own demons when he violently pushes his eldest son in an argument.
If the enigmatic presence of the spectral boy is real or a metaphor matters not as Muxart’s film, like the river, is grippingly hypnotic and full of possibilities. First love has never felt so haunted.
BFI Flare runs from 18-29 March 2026.
