Narrated in four parts across two decades, In the Summers by Alessandra Lacorazza depicts the twins who as children travel to Los Cruces in New Mexico to see their father whose troubled and unpredictable yet sensitive nature transformed them: memories that by then, they will always remember.
It has all the trappings of a classic melodrama high emotional stakes with complex moral conflicts. But, Lacorazza, a first time filmmaker whose script is motivated by family history, does it moderately focused on subtleties that occur the most in quiet moments making the films central conceit which narrates that as the sisters age, they are played by different sets of actors each pair takes the nuanced performance of the previous pair, Done astonishingly with no artifice.
In Lacorazza’s vision, the film is not only about the mosaic storytelling of a tumultuous childhood but a jigsaw puzzle, endless in its ability to recreate a story of moments, not just one. It is the ‘not’ that stands out in this particular film. It is about the quiet resurrection of all that has come before for all three protagonists. It speaks to how when constructing a narrative or a picture, grotesque moments spent with our families, plentiful or few, become quite literally a blank canvas, the very first rough draft of life of an individual.
Vicente who has been compellingly portrayed by Puerto Rican rapper René “Residente” Pérez Joglar as having an inchoate compelling power and being almost effortlessly intimidating presents himself as a complex figure in the life of his daughters: Violeta (Dreya Renae Castillo) and Eva (Luciana Quinonez) when still in their tender ages. He is ‘divorcee’ from their mother living in California, but having returned to the city of his childhood and shot by cinematographer Alejandro Mejía who soft casts this desert mesa into the nostalgic background only for the light to grow harsher and harder has returned to his childhood not only to memories but also to patterns of self destructive behavior which made the viewers believe was the cause for the divorce in the first place.
Yet, when he collects his two daughters from the airport and drives to his mother’s adobe style house, which he has inherited, Vicente is cheerful just like any other normal father, when playing with his daughter in the swimming pool at the backyard, or playing billiards with the neighborhood people at the local pub, and even when trying to teach his daughters about stars. Young children listen in fascination as Vicente finally speaks about things to make them curious. They do not hide their interest and thirst for knowledge, but in this beginning chapter, the viewers have every reason to fear for the well being of the entire Gonzalez family when the other guy’s cigarette is seen dangling from the man’s ear and a bulge of extreme alcoholism.
Nonetheless, it is quite unexpected when, while returning the girls home, he begins descending into madness, making jokes, and failing to comprehend the picture: Violeta, who sits behind in the car without a seatbelt and is attentive and watches Vicente almost topple over and realizes that relying on him to bring them home is a mistake. Quite the opposite: over the sound of heavy breathing and vowing to herself that ‘I shall not let that happen again,’ she appears to whisper inside her mind.
This is a small detail but still an important one, one of several things that happened that first summer with long term impacts in how later on, Vicente’s daughters perceive him but also perceive themselves relative to his aroundness and absentness, his care and disregard, and his emotional storms. It is not about such catastrophic and treathcing arguments and yelling between the parents and children, LaCorazza’s focus is different that focus rests on relatively small details which comprise sequences depicting her characters, their feelings towards each other fraught with tension, fragility, and, to varying extents, complexity, as they try to recreate moments of absolute bliss when everything was perfect.
Yet, one can’t help being reminded of time’s hurry, even if it is accompanied by upbeat Latino music, through these simple family portraits displayed in the Vanitas still life pregnant with altars or memento mori set in the course of action: life so cheap. The kids seem to have grown when they go see their father next, Eva (it was a few years earlier replaced with Allison Salinas) becoming a young lady needing her father, and Violeta (Kimaya Thais Limón) suddenly the elder sister who is, however, not really impressed. Short hairstyle suited Violeta much as she has a few childhood friends from the tavern who now look after the children whenever their father is not around. Violeta is in love with Camila (Gabriella Elizabeth Surodjawan) from Los Cruces and her father is a physics tutor to Camila from time to time. Barely Ms. Perman appears on the scene: Vicente, teases Eva saying, “seems to be another ugly specimen like her old hag mother.”
Likewise, Vicente appears immersed in liquor, an addiction which Violeta identifies now as alcoholism, and is involved in rowdy tantrums that keep pushing her away from him, especially when she is interfering with her sense of queer self that appears more powerful than what Vicente could tolerate.
Vicente, who now lives in the ruins of his life’s story, his now ruined home and his forever stained pool, overrun with mud and leaves, spends this summer in anger. And even the great high plateau, Las Cruces, gets its ugly, muggy feel, when we see in the previous parts of the film Violeta and Eva poking and scrambling around the decaying body of a dead squirrel that they had found in an underpass which remains unattended when their father goes away somewhere looking for work.
The visit is cut short when Vicente causes a car crash that completely frightens him. The next year, Eva returns only to find a new woman in her father’s (Leslie Grace) house with a child. Emotionally disturbed when he finds out that Violeta is in California, Vicente expects Eva to be his consolation. He has always told her so. For the next few weeks, she has some turbulent times ahead. Hanging out in the bar, Carmen feels bad for Eva, who was working on her billiard game just to get her father’s attention but found it counterproductive instead. Salinas, as the adolescent Eva, swims this part of “In the Summers” culture from the despair of his parents’ attitudes and the pain of unreciprocated love, have a sudden glimmer of hope when Vicente calls upon them, only to return to the world of sorrow the moment he closes his end of the conversation.
In the autumn of this year, Violeta, who has already had an operation, expects to enter a postgraduate institution. Eva, a heavy smoking woman wearing dark glasses, has amounts of sadnesses, some from last summer and some not, which maintain her alien and even more closer than Vicente could manage to close. How sad it is, but never vicious that Lacorazza, although showing how ostentatiously they love and respect one another, also shows, in a gentle way, the boundaries these two have created. Sin and pity, mixed and together at once, fill the spaces in between the two of them. Most of what had happened in the years between the two last saw one another Lacorazza has no intention to explain in that manner. But it is clearly visible to everyone that the distance between them does not promise any climactic argument or resolution in the way we expect its presence. Questions of healing are impossible here, only the outline of some contours of the earlier obtained wounds and how they were made.
For the viewers, actors’ harsh emotions were translated in updates on those relationships that have become unsightly and strenuous over the years. The viewers’ emotional buildup for “In the Summers” is gradual, however, the younger actors are strong enough to lift the rest above their abilities and skillsets. There was something exceptional in them as a unit, sharing the amazing experience of disintegration of a father and daughter relationship in the dynamics of the performance.
In line with this, the most painful from all is the performance of Joglar, where the ensemble of a man, an instinctive protector of his daughters infused with true love but who, when it matters most, allows his anger and frustrations to rise is as full as it can be. At one point late in the movie, he turns to other characters and explains, “you guys did okay without me,” which betrays not only a self evident personal fact, but a defeat even more excruciating given its starkness.
Winner of two major prizes the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and the Directing Award ”In the Summers” is able to be much more engaged with the setting. In her different chapters, one can see Lacorazza relishing in the sights of Las Cruces, with the sparkling nights hinting at bright possibilities and the rugged mountains hints at the character’s winding course laid beneath it. There is so much poetic beauty in the moment as Violeta and Eva, all grown up, and Vicente walk across gorgeous white sand dunes and capture on camera how a grown up Natalia (Indigo Montez) is being taken care by her dad. During these moments though time is paradoxically slow and fast; the hourglass seems to defy plausibility. There is almost a weariness about her, an understanding that, Lacorazza believes, who has lived, or at least one version of it, this story, that beginning is always impossible. ‘But who you were, have you been what you learnt, all this and more is carried to every incident which comes, and one keeps on moving’.
For more movies like In the Summers visit 123Movies.