tain theaters—check the listings to
see if yours is one of them—at 48
frames per second, a rate that not
only smooths out motion for the
eye but gives the brain a sense of
enhanced depth and ineffable rich-
ness. Actually Mr. Kossakovsky and
his co-cinematographer, Ben Bern-
hard, shot their film at 96 fps, but
few theaters can project at that
speed, so we must settle for the
lesser marvel.Much of the news about water
these days concerns its insuffi-
ciency—dwindling supplies of the
stuff, or ravaging drought. That’s
not the emphasis here. The
movie’s dominant mode is surfeit:
Miami pummeled by Hurricane
Irma, a vast cascade at Venezu-
ela’s Angel Falls that could pass
for a glimpse of the Creation or a
portrait of perpetual motion. One
sequence, though, calls perpetuityinto question.
The setting is Siberia’s Lake
Baikal, the world’s oldest and
deepest body of fresh water. Nor-
mally the lake freezes over so sol-
idly in winter that locals drive
their trucks and SUVs across it, ei-
ther for convenience or for fun. In
recent years, however, rapidly ris-
ing temperatures have decreased
the thickness of the ice and in-
creased the danger. Just how per-ilous the lake has become is illus-
trated graphically by a group of
men using crude but efficient gear
to winch out SUVs that have
crashed through the surface, and
then shockingly by an event that
the filmmakers could not have
foreseen. No one there, or any-
where else in the film, ever utters
the words “global warming,” yet
the message could not be clearer—
we are all of us living on thin ice.SONYPICTURES CLASSICSFilmmaker Victor Kossakovsky in ‘Aquarela,’ his unusual
documentary feature that looks at water in all its forms.Viveik Kalra as Javed, top; Mr. Kalra
with Nell Williams as Eliza, above;
Ms. Williams, Mr. Kalra and Aaron
Phagura as Roops, leftW
ARNER BROS. PICTURES (3)Afrustrated British teen
finds a source of joy in
the music of Bruce
Springsteen.INSTEAD OFtrompe l’oeil, which
seeks to fool us, “Aquarela” is a
triumph oftrempe l’oeil. It seeks
to drench us—in astonishingly
vivid, often hallucinatory images
of water. Victor Kossakovsky’s
documentary feature has no plot,
no kinship with “The Shape of Wa-
ter,” and no readily discernible
agenda, which is not to say it
lacks purpose. The subject truly is
H 20 in all its power and various
forms, from frozen to rainbow
mist. A work of singular beauty
and a significant technical
achievement, the film makes water
audible—the thumps and groans
of calving glaciers sound like the
planet coming apart—and almost
palpable; heaving mountains of
blue-black waves in an Atlantic
storm convey stupendous mass
and titanic energy as in no motion
picture I’ve seen before.
The effect—enhanced by Dolby
Atmos sound and an urgent score
by Eicca Toppinen—is so extraordi-
nary that I’d love to go on in this
vein, describing sequence after
spectacular sequence. First,
though, an explanation of why
these images look and feel as they
do. Conventional films are shot at
24 frames per second, a rate that
sustains the illusion of continuous
motion, though not always without
a trace of flicker. (When movies
were first dubbed “flicks” it was
because, at 16 or so frames per sec-
ond, they flickered conspicuously.)
“Aquarela” is being shown in cer-FILMREVIEW| JOE MORGENSTERN
Victor Kossakovsky’s ‘Aquarela’: Awash in Beauty
A
syouwatch
“Blinded by the
Light,” don’t let its
earnest trappings
blind you to the
beauty of its core.
Gurinder Chadha’s coming-of-age
drama transmutes the raw feeling
of Bruce Springsteen’s music into
another kind of feeling, no less
raw but leavened by giddy excite-
ment that culminates in joy.
The time is 1987, a period of
austerity in Margaret Thatcher’s
Britain; the setting is Luton, a
manufacturing town stricken by
recession. Javed (Viveik Kalra), a
British teen of Pakistani descent,
wants to be a poet but, lonely and
depressed, he’s off to an unprom-
ising start writing songs about nu-
clear war. After I saw Ms.
Chadha’s exuberant “Bend It Like
Beckham” almost two decades ago
I called it proof “that movies with
feel-good formulas don’t have to
be deadening or demeaning.” The
same goes for this one, which cov-
ers similar cultural territory. The
heroine of the earlier film is a
British girl of Indian descent who
wants to be a soccer star. Both
kids must contend with rigidly
conservative immigrant parents
and prejudice against Asians—dangerous prejudice, in Javed’s
case, since soaring unemployment
has spawned violent nativist
gangs. But there’s a big difference,
courtesy of The Boss—it’s the
power of his passionate songs to
lift the melancholy high-school
student’s spirits, stiffen his spine
and fire his imagination.
How Javed discovers Spring-
steen is just one device amongmany in the story—a chance en-
counter in a corridor with a class-
mate, Roops (Aaron Phagura), who
turns him on to some of the songs
and lends him cassettes of the es-
sential albums. The important
thing is the immediate conse-
quence, a quasi-religious revela-
tion. Springsteen in 1987 may be
ancient history for some, but for
Javed he’s a god transmitting in-recent upsurge of jukebox musicals
that has brought us, most notably,
“Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Rock-
etman.” “Blinded by the Light”
borrows anything it can use from
anywhere it pleases.
It’s kitchen-sink drama when
Javed and his family are in the
kitchen, where his sister, Shazia
(Nikita Mehta), wears swimming
goggles while chopping onions. It’s
socially significant when thugs
from the extreme right-wing Na-
tional Front rough up his father,
Malik (an exceedingly broad per-
formance by Kulvinder Ghir), on
the way to his cousin’s wedding.
It’s a jukebox musical, and a
charming one, when Javed bursts
into Springsteen songs that are
nearly as old as he is, yet speak to
him as if they’d been written on
the day he’s belting them out.
The first outbreak of this phe-
nomenon sends him onto Luton’s
streets in the middle of a hurri-
cane, a hyperlocal storm gener-
ated entirely by the power of
Bruce’s lyrics: “Sometimes I feel
so weak I just want
to explode / Explode
and tear this whole
town apart...” In fact
he soon has a sub-
stantial part of the
town singing with
him—and with
Bruce, whose voice
drives the sound-
track—as Ms.
Chadha’s film takes
leave not of its
senses but of en-
cumbering literalism
and flies off into
fantasy, unafraid of
its naiveté.
The screenplay,
written by Sarfraz
Manzoor, Ms.
Chadha and Paul
Mayeda Berges, was
loosely—very
loosely—based on a
memoir by Mr. Man-
zoor, who had idol-
ized Bruce Spring-
steen just as Javed
does. In real life The Boss re-
sponded to the book by contacting
its writer, and subsequently gave
his blessings—along with, more
significantly, music permissions—
to Ms. Chadha’s production. In the
movie, the fictionalized hero
never meets Springsteen, which is
all to the good, except that a pil-
grimage he takes to the holy land
of Bruce’s New Jersey is no more
than a perfunctory gesture, as if
production money had suddenly
run short. No matter, though. Mr.
Kalra provides an endearing por-
trait of an artist in the making,
and Nell Williams is fittingly irre-
sistible as Eliza, Javed’s politically
vociferous girlfriend. “Nobody
wins unless everybody wins,”
Springsteen likes to say. This little
movie is a big winner.FILMREVIEW| JOE MORGENSTERN
Delightful ‘Light’:
Born to Inspire
structionsfor living a good and
generous life through the head-
phones of an ordinary Walkman.
And the remarkable thing about
the film is how it transcends its
often conventional self to express
the fitful onset of Javed’s ecstasy.
In an earlier era of screen his-
tory, the stars of movie musicals
burst into song because it was the
only way they could give voice to
their outsize emotions. The extrav-
agance of that mode was pre-
empted by music videos, though it
sometimes returns in such com-
manding revenants as “La La
Land” or “A Star Is Born,” and in aA10|Friday,August 16 , 2019 THEWALLSTREETJOURNAL.
LIFE&ARTS