Told in four chapters spanning two decades, Alessandra Lacorazza’s “In the Summers” follows the relationship between two sisters and their troubled father, whom they visit over the years in Las Cruces, New Mexico, as their formative experiences are irrevocably altered by his volatile yet vulnerable disposition.
It’s the stuff of which classic melodramas are made, with their intense emotions and moral dilemmas. But Lacorazza, a first-time filmmaker whose script was inspired by her own family history, takes a softer approach that thrives mostly on small silences and conveys the film’s main narrative conceit — that, as they grow up, the sisters are played by different groups of actors, each pair building on the fine-grained emotional expression of the previous one — miraculously without artifice.
In Lacorazza’s hands, the film focuses less on individual memories of a troubled childhood than on their gradual accumulation; it is not a slice of life but rather a summation of the three protagonists’ own identities. It reflects the ways in which those fleeting moments spent with our families add up, whether happily or unhappily, to the first draft of a personal story that we are then left to analyze and process as adults.
Vicente, played in a commanding, quietly devastating debut by Puerto Rican rapper René “Residente” Pérez Joglar, is a complicated figure in the lives of his daughters, Violeta (Dreya Renae Castillo) and Eva (Luciana Quinonez), from an early age. Divorced from his mother, who still lives in California, he has returned to the town of his childhood (shot by cinematographer Alejandro Mejía, who tints this desert plateau in soft, nostalgic tones before the light grows harsher and harder) and has fallen back into patterns of destructive behavior that, we are led to understand, contributed to the dissolution of the marriage.
But when he picks up his daughters outside the airport and takes them to his mother’s adobe house, which he has inherited, Vicente is in high spirits; he swims with them in the backyard pool, plays pool at the neighborhood bar, shares their interest in stargazing, is playful and affectionate, clearly intelligent, and eager to share what he knows (or at least what he thinks he knows) with his daughters, who absorb him. Even in this first chapter, one can recognize the first signs of trouble in the cigarette over Vicente’s ear and his excessive drinking. Still, it comes as a shock when, as he drives his daughters home, he begins to drive erratically, jokingly, not seeing what we see: Violeta, frightened in the backseat, not buckling up and all too aware, as Vicente nearly crashes, that trusting him to get them home safely was a mistake. Under her breath, she seems to say to herself, “I won’t let that happen again.”
Small but significant, this moment is one of several from that first summer that has lasting consequences in shaping not only how Vicente’s daughters see him, but how they see themselves in relation to his presence and absence, his attention and neglect, his tempestuous emotions. Lacorazza’s interest is not in explosive confrontations between fathers and sons—though a few moments in which Vicente and Violeta’s long-simmering antagonism bubbles over into physical force receive the impact they deserve—but in subtle, finely detailed sequences that reflect their characters as they present themselves to each other: tense, tender, and in their own way. tryingIf not always to work for something better, at least to recover the fading magic of happier days.
But each of the chapters is separated by still life paintings reminiscent of Dutch Vanitas, altars filled with framed family photographs, and more. I remember death which, although with a lively Latin soundtrack, remind us how relentlessly time passes, without thinking twice about our best intentions. By the time the children visit their father, they are all grown up: Eva (now played by Allison Salinas) has become a young woman desperate for her father’s affection, Violeta (Kimaya Thais Limón) a wiser, older sister who distrusts him. Violeta, who now sports her hair short (as does the local waitress, Carmen (Emma Ramos), a childhood friend of Vicente’s who helps the girls when needed) is in love with a Las Cruces resident, Camila (Gabriella Elizabeth Surodjawan), whom their father occasionally tutors in physics. Eva, whom Vicente disparagingly remarks “takes after her mother,” just wants him to see her as worthy, on her own merits, of his interest.
Vicente, for his part, is struggling with what Violeta now recognizes as alcoholism, and is prone to outbursts that further alienate her, especially amidst his exploration of an emerging queer identity that connotes more autonomy than Vicente can accept. That summer, with his once-vibrant house falling into disuse and the pool increasingly stagnant with mud and leaves, Vicente crouches in the ruins of his life, and the high plateau of Las Cruces also takes on a damp, humid quality: Left unattended one day while his father tries to find work, Violeta and Eva push the rotting carcass of a squirrel into the underpass.
The visit ends abruptly, with Vicente at fault for a traumatic accident, and Eva returns alone the following summer to discover that her father’s new wife (Leslie Grace) has moved in with her, along with their newborn baby. That Violeta has stayed home in California upsets Vicente so much that Eva, in his eyes, is a consolation prize. A few months of loneliness lie ahead. At the bar, Carmen watches with pity as Eva, who tested herself by playing pool to impress her father, finds that hitting him has the opposite effect; as the teenage Eva, Salinas carries this central part of “In the Summers” through expressive eyes that open wide with hope at Vicente’s occasional pleas and brim with tears at his rejection.
In the film’s final chapter, set years later, Violeta (Lío Mehiel) and Eva (Sasha Calle) return to Las Cruces as adults, hardened by their past experiences and less interested in bonding with their father than in paying their respects. Violeta, who has already transitioned, will begin graduate school in the fall. Eva, now a chain smoker who hides beneath thick sunglasses, is nursing her own sorrows — some from last summer, some not — that keep her at a distance Vicente can’t hope to bridge. It’s painful, but never cruel, the way Lacorazza reveals the boundaries these two have drawn, and the mix of resentment and pity that fills the space between them. Without explaining most of what happened in the years since they last saw each other, Lacorazza makes it clear that there will be no climactic arguments or reconciliations here, or even healing: just the tracing of old wounds, a reflection on how they got there, and a chance to retrace familiar ground with a new appreciation for what it meant and means.
Mehiel and Calle are gifted performers who illuminate their characters’ intimate anxieties and the love that binds them. Yet the emotional impact of “In the Summers” is cumulative, given that they draw on the strengths of the younger actors, all of whom play their roles with grace and skill. As an ensemble, they achieve something extraordinary: the sense of a father-daughter bond unraveling in real time. In that sense, Joglar’s performance, which captures the true dimension of a man whose protective instincts and genuine love for his daughters are evident but whose frustrations get the better of him when it matters most, is the most heartbreaking of all. “You guys did fine without me,” he says at one point, late in the film, an admission of reality and failure all the more brutal for its frank nature.
Winner of the two top prizes (the U.S. Drama Grand Jury Prize and the Directing Award) at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “In the Summers” is remarkably attuned to its surroundings. Across its various chapters, Lacorazza takes time to revel in the beauty of Las Cruces, with bright night skies suggesting great potential and rocky mountain vistas reflecting the winding paths of the characters beneath them. As Violeta and Eva, now grown, accompany Vicente across stunning white sand dunes, watching up close as he raises his now-teenage daughter, Natalia (Indigo Montez), time seems to pass quickly and then stop, the hourglass, impossibly, for a moment, turning. With all the weariness and wisdom of someone who has lived this story, or at least a version of it, Lacorazza makes it clear that you can never start over. But you carry what you were, where you were, and what it taught you into everything that happens next, and you move on.