DAN WEBSTER:
Vincente loves his daughters. And who can blame him? When we first meet the two young girls in Alessandra Lacorazza’s movie In the Summers, they are young and impressionable. And, really, these early versions of Violeta and especially Eva are as cute as any kids who ever auditioned for a movie.
Which, actually, is how we do come to know them, as characters in Lacorazza’s first effort as a feature filmmaker (which, by the way, is available to watch on a variety of streaming services). Dad Vincente is played by the Puerto Rican rapper known as Residente (birth name René Pérez Joglar), while daughters Violeta and Eva are played over the course of the film by three separate pairs of actresses.
Set in the city of Las Cruces, New Mexico, In the Summers, which is split into four distinct chapters, takes place over several years. Said by the Colombian-born Lacorazza in interviews to be what she describes as “semi-autobiographical,” the film is a study of how a divorced father struggles to relate to his daughters during their summer vacations together—and how that struggle, over time, changes and ultimately wears on all three of them.
At first, everything goes well. Vincente meets the girls—Dreya Castillo as Violeta, Luciana Elisa Quinonez as Eva—at the airport and is all smiles. He takes them to his house, bequeathed to him—he explains—by his late abuela (or grandmother). It’s large and well-kept, more like the kind of place where a proud older woman would live than a single dad. But it pleases the girls, and Vincente is happy to play their host.
It doesn’t take long, though, to see the flaws behind Vincente’s genial front. He favors the older of the two, Violeta, and seems mostly oblivious to Eva’s attempts to garner his attention. And as the two girls discover, his emotions are mercurial, especially when he’s been drinking, which is often.
Years pass before the two return. Violeta has now begun transitioning, fluctuating between moods caused by a blending of teen angst and rebellion against Vincente’s controlling nature. Eva, meanwhile, remains as sweet and as desiring as ever of her father’s attention. For his part, though, he remains unaware—or more likely uncaring—something that becomes even clearer when, after Vincente and Violeta have a near-violent confrontation, Eva returns in chapter three alone, now full of her own silent resentments.
Lacorazza emphasizes the changing nature of the daughters by showing how, as time passes, Vincente’s house becomes ever more tattered—the backyard swimming pool, once pristine, gradually evolves into something more akin to a swamp. And, too, Vincente devolves from the dad anxious to share his love of the stars and shooting pool at a local bar to ever more of a sloppy drunk—at one point his behavior nearly proving fatal to all three of them.
And slowly, gradually, the daughters change, too. By the final chapter, the two—Lio Mehiel as the adult Violeta, Sasha Calle as the adult Eva—have again bonded. And they’ve done so while Vincente—his latest relationship fizzling even as he has a new, third daughter to gush over—still is unable to put his native intelligence (he once tutored students in Physics) to any real use, leaving him the damaged, imperfect man he was unable to avoid being.
Both the film and Lacorazza were a hit at January’s Sundance Film Festival, the film winning the grand jury prize for drama and Lacorazza being named best director. And largely that’s because of her ability to create characters who feel authentic, and her luck at finding the right actors to play them.
Besides the impressive cast of young women, the bar owner Carmen (played by Emma Ramos) plays Vincente’s longtime foil—and maybe the person who always has seen him for who he really is. Still, the most difficult role is that of Vincente himself, and Residente—a first-time actor—captures him well, endowing the character with a rage so prevalent to those unable, or unwilling, to make life what they want. Yet, too, he imbues Vincente with an underlying sense of vulnerability, one that deserves at least a tinge of sympathy.
It's fitting, though, that Lacorazza’s film ends with Violeta and Eva, their expressions both accepting and sad, yet somehow at peace, having become adults who’ve shed all illusions and accepted their father for who he is… faults and all.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.
