A Rape Allegation Sparks an Investigation into Corruption and Impunity in Gripping Drama

In a world where corruption is rampant, only money, not truth, let alone justice, prevails. The men in Robert Budina’s “Drop of Water” accept this statement as the organizing principle of their lives. This is their dogma, their only way of understanding the world. But the drama at the heart of Burdina’s riveting Albanian drama comes from the lead character, a city hall manager who sees himself as equally above the law and how such a system is not overtly violent, but is even committed to a kind of latent misogyny. It exists outside itself, although itself is the most obvious example of this.

Aida (a standout Gresa Pallaska) is a responsible woman; a woman whose pride in her own privilege and power makes her immune to imagining a world where she can’t have her way. In her business, she is accustomed to luring (and sometimes bribing) foreign investors into doing her bidding, signing the many construction contracts that allow her and her husband Ilir (Arben Bajraktaraj) to live a moneyed, carefree life in the small town where they live. We built their houses. A handyman who can enter any room she wishes (boardrooms, the police station, even a bedroom) and get what she wants on her terms, Aida is not a warm presence, but she still clearly has such hardened (perhaps even enhanced) power that she can use to get her way. To be this successful, external

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One morning, Aida’s world is turned upside down when her teenage son Mark (Paolo Iancu) is taken into custody, accused of raping a young girl. According to her testimony, the young girl was taken to a villa rented in Mark’s name, where she was eventually tied up (with a bag over her head) and repeatedly attacked. Turbulent in a world of accounts payable and outstanding, petty rivalries and brokered alliances, Aida immediately assumes foul play: Someone must be plotting against her in hopes of extricating her and Ilir from the lucrative deal they’ve just signed.

“He’s just a kid. How could a child do such a terrible thing?” he asks himself. It is easier for him to understand this development of events as an extension of the corrupt world in which he moves freely. But as more details begin to emerge, and as her husband and the powerful men Mark enlists to help exonerate him begin to push her further and further aside, Aida begins to wonder just how complicit he is, or what she might become if he’s going to blame her. First my son, first of all – including the obviously real truth.

“Drop of Water” keeps us firmly focused on Aida. Her maternal need to protect Mark continues to stand up against the persona she has created for all to see, even as Mark’s despair triggers some kind of warning signal within her. He soon finds that the life he has created for himself and his family is about to be completely turned upside down. His extreme efforts to protect what he has built trace a compelling indictment of the power of corruption in this former Soviet country, where dabbling in new construction goes hand in hand with impunity for kids like Mark (and his friend). Denis, the person Mark was protecting, who may or may not have been in that villa that night and who recorded Mark beating the girl in question, accepts this as his rightful right.

Budina, who co-wrote the film with Ajola Daja and Doruntina Basha, does not make Mark’s innocence (or guilt, for that matter) the film’s primary concern. “Waterdrop” doesn’t unfold like a procedural or a he-said, she-said drama, but it does borrow elements from such narrative frameworks. Instead, this is a story about how a system creates conditions that allow Mark and Denis to treat what they do with the indifference of the privileged.

“Why don’t you call the police?” Mark asks his father early on. “Don’t you know everyone?” And so, while the film carefully reveals what happened in the villa, it also carefully reveals its main character, for whom the tragedy becomes even more inevitable. Pallaska is the fulcrum of the film; the tone of her performance matches Budina’s stark disorientation as Aida finds herself losing even more of the ground on which she has built her career, her family, and her home.

From beginning to end, “Drop of Water” combines a simple naturalism with more laconic stylistic flourishes – as in dialogues where we encounter a legend about Lake Ohrid at a business meeting, in off-camera conversations, as in images of the upper part of the deboned fish on the plate during lunch. The result is a gripping film that serves as a modern fable about corruption, masculinity, impunity, and how towns, countries, and families struggle to separate the ways these three forces complement and reinforce each other.

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