Waterland

The future of high school teacher Tom Crick is unsure and his past is pursuing him. He stands a risk of losing his job since the school's department of history is threatened by cuts. Tom is challenged by an intelligent and rebellious student named Matthew, who Questions the importance of history since it is approaching its end anyway. This induces Tom to tell his students what history can teach and he begins to tell them his and his wife's life story. Through flashbacks and dreams we return to England in the year of 1943. The film is based on Graham Swift's touching novel of the same title.

Comment:
What remains when it is too late? When the tide turns and the river prepares to reclaim its part of the land? It is this moment that Tom Crick tries to draw out and comprehend emotionally when he starts to tell his and his wife Mary's common life story to a high school class in Pittsburgh. Everything that he has built up in that city far from the ocean, in a country that only lives for the present and the near future, will soon be shattered to pieces and carried by the tide to the low beaches of Waterland.
This is where he grew up, in a landscape shimmering with humidity, a landscape that continuously has to be won back from the sea. There the force of the tide cannot be
succumbed to. Nor can it be denied. One has to learn the secrets of the ocean; dig canals, build dams and floodgates; take it into use. According to Crick we have to relate to time in the same way. Perhaps the students are right when they say that history is about to reach its end, but does this mean we should succumb to it or deny it?
The inner driving force of the film comes from the sea and the passing of time, but also from Mary. By being uncompromisingly true to her feelings and her longing, she forces Tom to reexamine his new life and the new life to put him to new tests. When she is overwhelmed by a wordless grief over the child they have lost and can never get back, he realizes that she is about to leave him. In reality she has embarked upon a journey toward true reconciliation. Mary knows that pain, just like the sea, just like time, must be left to complete its movement. She also knows that there is no room for pain in Pittsburgh.
Earlier this year both The Prince of Tides and Cape Fear have used the landscape of the tide as the place where one can meet one's feelings and one's past. Is it a metaphor for the state of the world? On the way down from the deep there may not be time for anything but bailing water and seeking reconciliation.
Kerstin Gezefius