Mariel (Karla Souza) is a member of the Mexican diving team. As a 15-year-old she won bronze at the Olympics in Barcelona, and now she is in the prime of her career, in her late twenties, and is hoping for another medal at the upcoming Athens 2004 Olympics. She has been training since she was a little girl with the strict coach Braulio (Hernan Mendoza, wicked dad from After Lucia), but she cannot repeat the success of 12 years ago, which is hindered by injuries, but also by a urinary tract infection, which she hides from everyone. After her partner in double jumps is injured, the coach will find a 14-year-old girl Nadia as her new partner, for whom it will be her first major competition.
Preparations for the Olympics will soon be overshadowed by Nadia’s mother’s accusations that the coach sexually abused her, and Mariel will be the first to defend the coach and try to convince her partner’s mother to drop the application. However, facing the accusations seems to push Mariel to confront her own fears, memories and traumas that she seems to have suppressed and completely forgotten. Although going to another Olympics is her biggest goal, in Nadia she seems to see herself in those years and everything that happened to her then, will slowly begin to surface.
As if she will begin to understand that the manipulator Braulio sexually abused and traumatized her as a little girl, and now she is a kind of accomplice in the similar gruesome nastiness that Nadia is going through. Braulio skillfully manipulates her too, makes her feel guilty and blackmails her into not going to the Olympics if she doesn’t listen to him, and this harrowing sports drama, which is also a solid character study of the athlete, is based on real events. Sexual abuse of young athletes and even male athletes is something that probably happens more often than we can imagine, and the best example for us is the case of the American gymnastics team whose doctor abused countless girls for years.
Solidly “Dive” or “La Caida” directed by the Argentinian Lucia Puenzo (The German Doctor) based on the screenplay by Monica Herrerei Samara Ibrahim deals with this terrifying subject, and the whole film is carried by the excellent and convincing performance of Karla Souza. This actress who previously performed in some soap operas and later made her way in America with her role in the series “How to Get Away With Murder” was herself a victim of sexual abuse in her early twenties. The camera follows her almost entirely and from the beginning it is clear to us that Mariel almost feels like a prisoner of her own life. From the imposed expectations of the family and even the entire nation, as well as fear, impossibility and despair because she feels helpless and is afraid that she cannot change anything because without competition she will be nobody and nothing.