European Films

Mar adentro (The Sea Inside) is about a man’s ambiguous relationship with the sea, a sea that both gave him life and then destroyed it to the point that it was not worth living anymore. Galician Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem) came from a family of sailors, until a dive into a shallow lagoon proves nearly fatal. Sampedro remained a quadriplegic (paralysed from the neck down) for the rest of his life and forced his family to abandon the sea for a life on a small self-sufficient farm more inland in order to take care of him. Sampedro did really exist and became something of a media-phenomenon when he expressed his wish to die, because according to him, life as a quadriplegic was not dignified enough for him to live.

The tragic thing about Sampedro’s case was that he was not even able to commit suicide because he was paralysed; according to the Spanish laws of that time assisted suicide equalled murder, though people who attempted suicide on their own were never punished.

Spanish cinema wunderkind Alejandro Amenábar (Abre los ojos/Open Your Eyes, The Others) had been intrigued by the terribly human story of Sampedro and decided to make a film about it.  Amenábar wrote the screenplay together with his Abre los ojos writing partner of  Mateo Gil and offers the audience a re-imaging of the last years of Sampedro’s life and his quest to die with dignity. The primary ally of Sampedro in his crusade is the Barcelonese lawyer Julia (newcomer Belén Rueda), who works for an association that tries to legalise euthanasia. Julia will try everything in her power to give Ramón what he wants legally; the fact that he has to serve as a test-case for the entire country and its legislation notwithstanding.

Julia, who harbours a few dark secrets herself,  comes to stay at the farm of the Sampedros in order to work with Ramón as much as possible. She meets Ramón’s brother, who is against euthanasia and his wife Manuela (Mabel Rivera), who takes care of Ramón pretty much 24 hours a day and thinks that her opinion on the matter is not important. Also part of the household are Ramón’s aging father, who thinks it is up to Ramón to decide and his younger nephew, who still goes to school and treats his uncle like any other member of the household. Another addition to the already full quarters at the farm comes in the form of Rosa (Lola Dueñas), a woman with two little children who lives nearby and who has heard about Ramón’s case on the radio and decides to visit him. She becomes a very regular visitor despite the fact that she thinks Ramón should choose life and not death.

A work such as ‘Mar adentro’ is made or broken by the way the relationships between the people are portrayed since there is no other action in the film. This could have easily become a melodrama of made-for-TV quality, but the director sidesteps most of these problems by offering cinematic solutions such as wonderfully filmed dream-sequences and a very rich variety of characters that seem grounded in reality rather than based on stock examples. Amenábar and Gil have decided to include many characters in a sort of extended family around the immobile Ramón; this decision makes it difficult for the writers themselves as all the characters demand due time and attention, but their script is both perceptive and economic. They give everyone just the space they need to be more than a two dimensional character, but do so in a way that does not take the focus of the story away from Ramón. All of the actors do impressive work under Amenábar’s direction but the most resonant scenes are between Bardem and the three leading ladies: Rueda, Rivera and Dueñas. Each woman has a different relationship with Ramón and different opinions and needs for herself. The trio and their relationship to the quadriplegic -both the man and the physical state- are at the heart of the film and provide the most tears and laughter.

Mar adentro does not want to preach about its subject but repeatedly insists it just wants to tell the story of one particular man. With the performance of Bardem at its centre, Mar adentro succeeds in making that man’s story both enchanting and enriching and not half as depressing as the premise might lead one to suspect. The entire look of the film (shot on location in Galicia with its sweeping vistas towards the sea) and the music (written by the director himself) add to this feeling of life spurring on to be lived before it is cut shot –though whether only death can cut short a life or whether a grave accident can do likewise might depend on who you ask. Sampedro  would have argued for the latter.