‘In The Summers’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr: Alessandra Lacorazza. US. 2024. 98mins

In The Summers won two significant prizes at Sundance 2024: the first for directing, and the second for best film in the US Dramatic section. Alesandra Lacorazza’s clear directorial talent is both the bedrock of this film and, evidently, both awards. A deliberately-distanced, carefully-calibrated three-act story about two young girls who travel – over the years – to their troubled father in Las Cruces, New Mexico, for summer holidays, it is one of those debut films which rings a talent klaxon above and beyond its achievements.

There is an authenticity and reality to events and characters 

The film’s awards and the fact it stars Rene Perez Joglar, aka the wildly popular Puerto Rican rapper Residente, will see it travel. Lacorazza, who has based (at least partially) this coming-of-age story around her own childhood, should see doors open up to her talent. The sheer number of producers credited on this small, personal film would normally herald trouble and, at least in the writing, it fails to connect in the way it should or fulfil its own early promise. But there is enough here to satisfy audiences, and an intriguing element to the way it addresses Latino cultural issues which begs for more.

This is Perez Joglar’s first role, and a difficult one to work with given that his character, Vicente, is presented without context and remains opaque throughout – as a child might see him. This is where Lacorazza’s choices are exciting: she introduces her Act 1 after he has shakily cleared the living room table of empty cans and ashtrays in his adobe bungalow,and gone to meet his young daughters Violeta and Eva at the airport. Her chapter title cards are still lives which give clues and Puerto Rican colour to a film otherwise set in the washed-out blues of New Mexico. And she wants the audience to work to figure out who her characters are.

Her actors certainly do a lot of the heavy lifting. Apart from Joglar, three sets of performers take the roles of Eva and Violeta, culminating in Sasha Calle and Lio Mehiel (from last year’s Sundance hit Mutt). But the film’s final act is its weakest. The terrain is much more fertile in the early stages as we glean their characters and try to piece together the situation that has led to this strange, unsettling familial situation.

Some answers are always going to remain elusive. The heavily-tattooed and mostly drunk Puerto Rico-born Vicente seems to be, improbably, a maths teacher of some sort who has returned to Las Cruces, where he grew up, and has inherited his mother’s bungalow. He is the type of fun/dangerous dad where a spaghetti eating contest quickly turns into drunken driving, and he teaches his seriously underage daughter how to smoke pot. He’s not unfamiliar as a screen type, but Perez Joglar gives him depth and danger. 

Also very finely-depicted are the children and how they cope. Younger daughter Eva is initially favoured by Vicente: she’s cute and easy to please while Violeta is sulkier and already on a road to questioning her sexuality. When Eva grows to resemble their mother, though, her father is brusque in dismissing her and takes greater pleasure in Violeta’s more masculine, confrontational approach. But by then, Act 2, his life is already turning squalid and about to go into free-fall. A constant to the girls’ lives in La Cruces is Vicente’s bar-owning friend Carmen (Emma Ramos) who is on-hand to provide lifts when their father either forgets them or is too drunk to drive.

There is an authenticity and reality to events and characters that make it no surprise to discover that In The Summers is semi-autobiographical. Yet the film does fall back at the final hurdle: thoughts continue to be unexpressed, and Lacorazza stubornly maintains an authorial distance, even as the colour palette warms and Vicente’s circumstances change to the point where questions could be asked.

Throughout, Alejandro Meija’s camera remains tight and pleasingly structured – this is not a handheld rush of youthful memories, but a careful interrogation of the frame. Some small amount of Spanish-language dialogue is not translated, a decision that works well. And a traditional score breathes a past into a troubling present. The future, though, is always unclear.