In last week’s column I told you about Beyond the Light Barrier, a documentary by Uga Carlini being screened as part of the expanded film programme at this year’s Hilton Arts Festival. Underlying this entertaining foray into the slightly cooky territory of aliens and UFOs is an ancient theme — the search for connection with something beyond oneself.
Carlini’s subject, Elizabeth Klarer, imagined an extraterrestrial lover and purveyed her cosmic fantasy to the world. Beyond the Light Barrier is neatly counterpointed by a very different film in Greig Coetzee and Jillian Edelstein’s The Water Rats, which will have its African premier at Hilton. Coetzee and Edelstein present a tale that is mundane in the best sense: it is very much “of this world”, an understated and simple tale about people who find one another in locked-down London and become a steadfast group of friends.
What binds these self-styled water rats is a shared passion for open-water swimming. More specifically, they swim in all weathers — the colder the better — in the ponds at Hampstead Heath. Their bond is forged under the constrained conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic, dodging coppers who have been instructed to stop gatherings of more than two people (everywhere except 10 Downing Street), and then stripping bare for late-evening and predawn dips.
Coetzee and Edelstein are, to put it in reductive terms, both expat SA artists living in London. Edelstein is a prolific photographer, and Coetzee a man-of-all-trades creative who has written, directed and performed for stage and screen. Though their SA identities do not explicitly inform the film, SA viewers will quickly feel at home among the water rats, not least because they share the thrill of low-key lawbreaking as a form of resistance against the unjustified exercise of authority.
This may be a story set in England, but it doesn’t feel very “English”. Through Edelstein’s photographs, and in the narratives of the swimmers, The Water Rats lovingly treats the birds that grace the ponds and the trees that line the banks. Aside from the landscape, however, it is a cosmopolitan affair; the members of the group have a variety of national backgrounds, a fact that seems to chime with the ways in which each occupies a marginal position of one kind or another.
One is grieving the loss of a parent. One is going through a divorce. One is a recovering addict. Yet these sources of pain do not define them. A key moment in the film comes when one of the interviewees describes his fellow rats as a “gorgeous” gathering of “broken people” — then corrects himself: “Actually they’re not broken at all, just really normal human beings who are prepared to show their vulnerability and to support one another.”
This, to me, encapsulates the appeal of The Water Rats compared to Beyond the Light Barrier. Elizabeth Klarer appears in the heroic mode, achieving status by reaching for the extraordinary. The London lockdown swimmers, by contrast, seek comfort in the collective and in everyday (albeit quirky) rituals. They immerse themselves in ordinary elements: water, darkness, cold, quiet. Doing this, they find community, physical health and mental wellbeing.
Various rats also attest to how, plunging below the surface or floating on their backs, they experience spiritual invigoration and even moments of mystical insight. Yet they are not supercilious. The rats don’t take themselves too seriously — who could, with their wobbly bits on display amid the mud, ice and snow?
Watching Credo Mutwa offering a vindication of Klarer in Beyond the Light Barrier, I thought about Mutwa’s own visions drawing the attention of the most execrable conspiracy theorists. When vivid metaphors become literal claims, merging first with bias and then with bigotry, alarm bells ring. It’s a short step from aliens and “lizard people” to anti-Semitism, QAnon and right-wing extremism.
The Water Rats pursues the opposite agenda: inclusion. Palestinian and Jewish people, men and women, lean and large, all take off their clothes and plunge into the icy waters of a Hampstead pond. Are they crazy? A little. But then, as the poet wrote, much madness is divinest sense.
• The Hilton Arts Festival runs from 11-13 August.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.