“Does it hurt?” Lukas (Paulius Markevicius) is asked by his wife Ernesta (Gelminė Glemžaitė) at the start of “Drowning Dry,” dapping him up in the dressing room after leaving the ring where he’s just fought as the rest of the family stands outside, ready to offer congratulations. The MMA fighter won’t reveal any pain on his end, but it’s clear from the tears Ernesta sheds that his insistence on keeping his semi-pro career going in the sport has done damage, if not to him, to their family as a whole. Rather than entering a vacation with the feeling of victory as they meet up with Ernesta’s sister Juste (Agnė Kaktaitė) and her husband Tomas (Giedrius Kiela) at their family’s lakeside retreat, there’s something more ominous in the air.
Any preexisting tensions can’t be left unaddressed after what ends up happening in Laurynas Bareisa’s arresting drama, in which Juste and Tomas’ young daughter Urte goes missing in the water and the ensuing panic brings out long-standing issues for both couples, both internally and with one another as a brewing disagreement over what should happen with the house they’re staying in when some could use the money more than others turns into a far greater fissure when there are less trivial matters at hand. Divisions aren’t only well-observed in the relationship dynamics baked into Bareisa’s screenplay, but in how the director inventively goes about depicting a fracture in time, moving between the present and future with bluntly effective cuts to show how the event hits each character differently, perhaps varying in impact yet feeling in every case as if one is on the receiving end from one of Lukas’ punches.
Following a celebrated premiere at Locarno this fall where it swept the festival’s top awards for acting, director and Golden Leopard for Best Film, “Drowning Dry” was selected by Bareisa’s native Lithuania as its official selection for the Oscars and recently picked up for U.S. distribution by Dekanalog, which previously released his debut “Pilgrims” (that you can – and should – watch here). Recently, the filmmaker graciously took the time to talk about the personal experience that led him to tell this story, investing the time to tell it properly and how emotional precision came by loosening up his approach as a director.
From what I understand, this started from a personal place. How did it become something that you wanted to pursue as a movie?
This film started while I was doing my first film [“Pilgrims”], and it connects to something that was happening in my life. Just before leaving for Venice [for the premiere of “Pilgrims”], I had a similar situation with my kid. It was not a drowning, but with choking and he was alright, but afterwards, moving on from this event and what happened in my previous film, these events kept mixing for me. I didn’t understand. Everything was okay after the event, but I had these similar experiences to post-traumatic experiences, waking up at night, checking if he’s there.
So I wanted to pursue this first to try to understand [the situation for] myself. How can you deal with an almost tragic event? With a tragic event, it happens and then we deal with it. But if it’s almost tragic — if someone doesn’t drown — you [continue to be] affected by it. I also wanted to deal with what was happening at that time with [“Pilgrims”] and how I was presenting it. I just wanted to run away from it, and I just started writing. This film was actually called [initially] “The Lithuanian Sisters” because I just wrote it very simply. I didn’t realize that I was going to make it. I just used it as a coping thing and then when we wanted to present it outside, we changed the name because “Sisters” is [too generic] for a film title, but it’s very much connected to the previous film.
It’s interesting that it was originally called “Sisters” because it’s very much about the interaction between these two couples. How did the dynamics between them develop?
I wanted to split the normal reaction to something like this and to split the four corners like it’s a square. Every one of these characters represents a different way of coping. For example, one character is not coping but engaging reality. One character is very much physical, but he has no reflection on how other people feel or how other people feel about him, so he’s [a bit] ignorant, but also he’s very capable and very present. If something’s happening, he’s reacting physically, but there’s no emotional reactions. Then the other male character was someone who is very much aware of what everybody’s thinking, but in these critical moments, he’s stuck. The same with the female characters. From the outside, you would think that one of the characters is someone who has less strength, but in the end she’s the most resilient, like a person who every time reacts [immediately] to everything and she keeps going. But her sister is someone who seems already defeated before something happens.
I wanted these four characters to interact with each other and to [reflect] how you interact with reality and with difficult stuff, and I didn’t want to tell the story from one perspective because I wanted the discussion between characters to evolve into a discussion for the viewer because even when I talk with people after the film, everybody [associates themselves with] a different person. For me, the film is structured around Justine because her traumatic experience is when she realizes that her daughter is underwater and she’s not coming out herself, so that’s where the time splits. That was my own realization, like something changes. You cannot unsee it even though the person is okay. The daughter survived, but she has no way of letting go an image of her being dead.
When you brought in your cast, did the dynamics in your mind change at all when you saw them actually reacting off one another?
Yeah, to get the chemistry right, we decided to go step by step, just to match one [actor] to the other and we started from [the character of] Juste because she seemed like the most difficult to cast, and then we matched her to her sister [Ernesta], then we matched her to her husband [Tomas]. So we had these three and then we tried to find the fighter husband [Lukas], but my original idea was to have a real fighter because I realized that there was no Lithuanian actor who is physically in this shape to be an MMA fighter. We [brought in] a lot of these guys, and we had two in the final stage [where] we had a rehearsal with other cast members, and they both were not in the same rhythm as the other actors, and everybody had to slow everything down to them. They were really [authentic] and nice, but in the end, it didn’t work as a group.
Somehow I got lucky because with Paulus Markavčius, he’s actually a theatre director and a professional actor, and he’s super busy, but I called him, and it was after his first baby, so his [life] slowed down and he had three months to physically get in shape, and then it was all right because the connection was there because we worked on previous films [together]. But I was just lucky that he could overcome this [casting situation] because this physical transformation is uncommon in Lithuania. It’s a very American thing, and [sometimes we] think that, “Oh, we have time to do this, but nobody does it here.” But I think it was also one of [Paulus’] goals to try something like this.
I saw him in Locarno and couldn’t believe it was the same guy that I had seen on screen. I’ve heard that as a director, this was very different in your approach from your first because you were your own cinematographer, so you didn’t have to articulate your thoughts as you would’ve before.
Yes, I try to find a way to do a film for every project differently because I also work as a cinematographer, and as a cinematographer, you always adapt every time you get a project. My first film as a director was very structured and very thought out before. We shot it chronologically, and it was very strict, [in terms of] the compositions and everything else. Here [in “Drowning Dry”] because I shot myself, I wanted to have more intuition [where] sometimes I’d go, “This is the camera, just talk with the actors, and then shoot it,” just to have more responsibility for myself, but also a bit more freedom, because with a cinematographer, you always have to discuss and ground your vision. Here you can just be free and for this film, I wanted to have more space to improvise and to work with the actors, also adjust and adapt to everything that’s happening. So even though we had the structure, it was liberating have all the space to play around. We could go anywhere.
I also wanted every shot to have a psychological perspective towards what’s happening because when you see a film, you start in a present time, but [this film], especially the first part, is a remembered present time. It’s something you reflect on, but when you have a memory, you’re always out. In our real time, we’re always first person, but most of the memory is the third person and you see yourself in the memory. So I wanted to have this strange, timely perspective in this film, and the composition in my previous film was very much connected to to the architecture and geography of the place [it was set], so it was very structured, and I could plan out before how the shots are going to look because I was shooting space. But here, I was shooting memory, so I always wanted to keep myself fresh and to have options to go different places and to have actors that are not afraid that I will change something.
From what I understand, there was also a three-month break in between the shoot to give the actors distance from filming the tragedy. How did you figure out you could set the production in that way?
Yeah, I wanted to have this time pass for these actors. We shot in the summer, then we had one day in autumn where we shot the food [that’s rotted] in the end of the film, and then after a couple of months, we shot the winter part, because I wanted both the actors and myself to have this gap psychologically, and I could edit, and see what I have.
You obviously knew how the film would be structured, but once you got back to the edit did anything change in your mind about how you’d reflect that fractured experience?
All of the jumps were in the script. We had time to improvise, but it was mostly based on the second part of the story after the drowning, so we had a week of five shooting days where we tried different things and tried to find different situations for how they coped. For example, there’s the scene where the two men sit together in front of each other, and in the script, the scene was very much dialogue-heavy. But we tried it and we felt it didn’t work. We shot a silent scene, and then next day we reshot it because we didn’t like the food. We had some room to improvise inside the scenes and reshoot the scenes and find different variations, but the whole structure was [in place] before because we had to prepare all of the connections, from lake to the pool, from one ambulance to the other, to have these connections.
What’s it been like to start to see this get out into the world?
The festival [run] is quite similar to the one we had with “Pilgrims,” so it’s the same emotions. It’s very nice to show your film and it’s important to spread the films. We screened in Korea where the reaction was interesting. But the most surprising thing was our local release because “Pilgrims” was [little seen domestically], and here we had one of the biggest autumn releases. It was very, very big and this film was received really warmly back in Lithuania, so that was very nice.
“Drowning Dry” will release in the U.S. next year via Dekanalog.