In a world where corruption is rampant, only money – not truth, let alone justice – prevails. The men in Robert Boudina’s A Drop of Water take this statement as the organizing principle of their lives. It is their faith, and it is the only way they understand the world. But the drama at the heart of the Albanian drama gripping Burdina comes from its lead, a city council director who believes she is equally above the law, and discovers in real time how such a system relies on the kind of latent if not overt violent misogyny that she buys into. . It itself exists outside of it, when in fact it is the most obvious example of it.
Aida (the excellent Grisa Balaska) is a woman in charge, a woman whose pride in her privilege and power makes her immune to imagining a world in which she doesn’t get what she wants. In her job, she is accustomed to luring foreign investors (and sometimes bribing them) to do her bidding, signing numerous construction contracts that allow her and her husband Ilir (Arbin Bajraktaraj) to live a wealthy, carefree life in the small town in which they live. I made their home. Aida can walk into any room she wants—board rooms, police headquarters, even her bedroom—and get what she wants on her own terms. Aida does not have a warm presence, yet she is clearly taking advantage of (or perhaps even sophisticated) the degree of hardening of the exterior in order to be Very successful.
One morning, Aida’s world is turned upside down when her teenage son Mark (Paolo Ianco) is detained after being accused of raping a young girl. According to her testimony, the girl was lured to a villa rented in Mark’s name, where she was eventually tied up (with a bag over her head) and repeatedly assaulted. Mired in the world of settled accounts payable, in petty rivalries and brokered alliances, Aida immediately assumes a foul play: someone must frame him in the hopes of extricating her and Ilir from the lucrative deal they’ve just signed.
“He’s just a child. How could a child do something so terrible?” she asks herself. It is easier for her to understand this turn of events as an extension of the corrupt world in which she moves so freely. But as more details emerge, and as her husband and the powerful men he recruits to help purge Mark begin to marginalize her more and more, Aida is left to wonder how complicit she is or how much she can allow herself to become if she wants to put her in her place. The Son first, above all else, including the actual truth.
“A Drop of Water” makes us focus intensely on Aida. Her motherly need to protect Mark—even when his desperation triggers a kind of warning sign within her—continues to confront the persona she has created for all to see. She soon sees the life she created for herself and her family about to be turned upside down. The extreme efforts she’ll go to protect what she’s built are tracked alongside an intriguing indictment of the power of corruption in this former Soviet country, where the transport and handling of new construction goes hand in hand with boys who get away with it like Mark (and his friend) Dennis, who… He may or may not have been in that villa that night, and who may have recorded Mark manhandling the girl in question, who could be the person Mark is covering for) considered their righteous right.
Boudina, who co-wrote the film with Ajula Daga and Dorontina Pasha, doesn’t make Mark’s innocence (or guilt, for that matter) the film’s primary concern. “A Drop of Water” unfolds neither like a procedural drama, nor like the drama it said it should be, though it borrows elements from such narrative frameworks. Instead, this is a story about how the system creates the very conditions that allow Mark and Denise to deal with what they did with the indifference of the privileged.
“Why don’t you call the police?” Mark asked his father ahead of time. “Don’t you know everyone?” Thus, as the film carefully unfolds and reveals what happened at the villa, it also carefully reveals its central character, whose tragedy becomes more inevitable for him. Pallaska is the film’s anchor, the tenor of her performance matching the steely disorientation Budina generates whenever Aida finds herself losing the ground on which she has built her career, family, and home.
Throughout the film, Waterdrop blends direct naturalism with more elliptical stylistic flourishes—in dialogue, as when we are treated to a legend about Lake Ohrid during a business meeting, as well as in imagery, as when off-camera conversations are recorded by shots from above a boneless fish on Dish during lunch. The result is an intriguing film that functions as a modern myth about corruption, masculinity, impunity, and the way cities, countries, and families alike find it difficult to untangle the way these three forces complement and reinforce each other.