This is a very irrational and difficult movie to follow. When I first saw it on a large theater screen, the nudity and sex kept my attention. But most of all, the vibrant colors in the film were very prominent in the screen version. Sadly, that is not the case in the video tape version I watched recently. I could not find it on DVD.
So I used the nudity and sex to keep my attention while I tried to detach from it at the same time and be objective. That helped me find the deeper story. And although this is a very irrational story, the characters display very normal behaviour in that they continue to repeat their same folly over and over. The men are all playing trivial games with each other and with the women in their lives. In order to get them to break out of their banality, the women try their best to get them to wake up.
When they collaborate with the main male character, who is a coroner, the three main females try to use logic to justify their actions. But he just doesn't catch on. He uses the women and their circumstances to gain sexual favors from them. He, like the murdered men he buries, seems oblivious to what these females are trying to bring to him.
In order to get a sense of what this story is about, it helped me to use some symbolism. In the title, "drowning" represents the belief that one is imprisoned or suppressed. All the males in the film drown. The other symbol I looked at was "swimming" which is the desire to be accepted or loved. All three female main characters are strong swimmers and all have the same name.
In the end, you can moralize about the actions of the women, but that is not what this story is about. If you look objectively at the behaviour of the men, they are caught up in their lack of belief in themselves. So they waste time trivializing their lives. This lack of responsibility on the part of the men affects not only them but their families and the whole community.
The women are so tired of not getting love and strength from the men in their lives that they are willing to risk their own futures by murdering those men. Not a very rational choice, but very poignant one. One almost has to laugh at the men who just don't seem to get it.
So I used the nudity and sex to keep my attention while I tried to detach from it at the same time and be objective. That helped me find the deeper story. And although this is a very irrational story, the characters display very normal behaviour in that they continue to repeat their same folly over and over. The men are all playing trivial games with each other and with the women in their lives. In order to get them to break out of their banality, the women try their best to get them to wake up.
When they collaborate with the main male character, who is a coroner, the three main females try to use logic to justify their actions. But he just doesn't catch on. He uses the women and their circumstances to gain sexual favors from them. He, like the murdered men he buries, seems oblivious to what these females are trying to bring to him.
In order to get a sense of what this story is about, it helped me to use some symbolism. In the title, "drowning" represents the belief that one is imprisoned or suppressed. All the males in the film drown. The other symbol I looked at was "swimming" which is the desire to be accepted or loved. All three female main characters are strong swimmers and all have the same name.
In the end, you can moralize about the actions of the women, but that is not what this story is about. If you look objectively at the behaviour of the men, they are caught up in their lack of belief in themselves. So they waste time trivializing their lives. This lack of responsibility on the part of the men affects not only them but their families and the whole community.
The women are so tired of not getting love and strength from the men in their lives that they are willing to risk their own futures by murdering those men. Not a very rational choice, but very poignant one. One almost has to laugh at the men who just don't seem to get it.