Blank Slates Win Eventually—If Institutions Decide They Meant To

Gael García Bernal's 'Hombre al Agua,' which premiered at Venice, is formally intricate work about narrative construction — layered, self-aware, visibly ambitious. And its protagonist is nearly nothing. The prevailing criticism holds that this emptiness is a flaw, a gap between the film's conceptual ambition and its inability to animate the human being supposed to carry it. But this particular standoff has happened before, and the resolution teaches you something about how cinema actually gets canonized.

Robert Bresson's 'Au Hasard Balthazar' arrived in 1966 with the same split reaction. Critics called the donkey blank, evasive, an excuse for abstraction. Bresson had not created a character — he had created a formal absence. The film's canonical reversal did not happen because the emptiness was newly understood as intentional. It happened because institutions eventually decided that accepting the absence as a formal move was the price of calling the work great.

What changed was not the film but the interpretive permission structure. Viewers who loved 'Balthazar' learned to experience the donkey's blankness as a mirror for projection rather than a failed characterization. A formal choice, deliberate and productive. This retroactive canonization has become cinema's most reliable mechanism for elevating ambitious formally-driven work that cannot quite animate its center.

García Bernal's problem is simpler than the critics suggest. Meta-narrative layering cannot exempt a film from the characterization it chooses to stage. If the protagonist's emptiness is intentional. If it serves the film's argument about narrative construction. Then the film must show you that intention working, must make the blankness productive on screen. Formal self-awareness is not permission to leave a performance unmade. The architecture can be transparent without the character being transparent, too.

Meta-narrative layering cannot exempt a film from the characterization it chooses to stage.

So here is what actually matters about 'Hombre al Agua': not whether the emptiness was strategic. Whether García Bernal's work will eventually accumulate the institutional weight to declare it was. Bresson got that retroactive read. Whether this film does depends less on what García Bernal intended and more on how many curators, retrospectives. Serious viewers decide the emptiness was worth accepting. That is not a flaw in how cinema works. That is how cinema works.