In the Summers 2024
Cast
Residente as Vicente
Sasha Calle as Eva
Lio Mehiel as Violeta
Leslie Grace as Yenny
Emma Ramos as Carmen
Sharlene Cruz as Camilla
Director
Alessandra Lacorazza
Writer
Alessandra Lacorazza
Told in four chapters that span 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—with their heightened emotions and moral dilemmas—are made. But Lacorazza, a debut filmmaker whose screenplay was inspired by her own family history, takes a gentler approach that swells most in small silences and renders the film’s main narrative conceit—that, as they grow, the sisters are portrayed by different sets of actors, each pair building upon the fine-grained emotional expression of the last—miraculously without artifice.
In Lacorazza’s hands, the film becomes less about individual memories of a fraught childhood than their gradual accumulation; it’s not slice-of-life but rather summation-of-self, for all three protagonists.
It reflects the ways in which those fleeting moments we spend with our families add up, however happily or unhappily, to the first draft of a personal history we’re then left as adults to parse and process.
Vicente—played in a commanding, quietly devastating debut performance by the 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 a young age.
Divorced from their mother, who still lives in California, he’s since returned to the city of his childhood—shot by cinematographer Alejandro Mejía, who casts this desert mesa in soft, nostalgic hues before the light grows harsher and harder— and fallen back into patterns of destructive behavior that, we’re led to understand, contributed to the marriage’s dissolution.
But when he picks his daughters up in front of the airport and drives them back to his mother’s adobe-style house, which he’s inherited, Vicente is in high spirits; swimming with them in the backyard pool, holding court around a billiards table in the neighborhood bar, sharing his interest in stargazing, he’s playful and affectionate, clearly intelligent and eager to share what he knows—or at least what he thinks he does—with his children, who soak it up.
Even in this first chapter, one can recognize early signs of trouble in the cigarette over Vicente’s ear and his overindulgence in alcohol.
Still, it comes as a shock when, while taking his daughters home, he starts to drive erratically, joking around, failing to see what we see: Violeta, startled in the backseat, not buckled in and keenly aware, as Vicente nearly crashes, that trusting him to get them home safely was a mistake. Quietly, she seems to say to herself, “I won’t let that happen again.”
Small but significant, this moment is one of several that first summer with lasting consequences in how it shapes not only the way Vicente’s daughters see him but the way 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 parents and children—though a few moments at which long-simmering antagonism between Vicente and Violeta bubbles over into physical force are afforded the impact they warrant—but in subtle, finely detailed sequences that reflect her characters as they present themselves to one another: tense, tender, and in their own ways trying, if not always to work toward something better than at least to recapture the fading magic of happier days.
But each of the chapters is separated by still-life tableaux resembling Dutch Vanitas, altars filled with framed family photographs, and other memento mori that, though soundtracked by lively Latin music, remind us of how relentlessly time passes, without a second thought for our best intentions.
When the children visit their father next, they’ve grown—Eva (now played by Allison Salinas) into a young woman desperate for her father’s affection, Violeta (Kimaya Thais Limón) into an older, wiser sibling who’s wary of him. Violeta, now wearing her hair short—like the local bartender, Carmen (Emma Ramos), a childhood friend of Vicente’s who steps up for the girls when she needs to—is enamored of a Las Cruces resident, Camila (Gabriella Elizabeth Surodjawan), whom her father occasionally tutors in physics.
Eva, whom Vicente disparagingly remarks “looks just like 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 he’s prone to outbursts that push her further away, especially amid her exploration of an emerging queer identity that connotes more agency than Vicente can accept.
That summer, with his once-vibrant home falling into disrepair and the pool increasingly stagnant with mud and leaves, Vicente squats in the ruins of his life, and the high mesa of Las Cruces takes on a dank, humid quality as well — left unattended one day as their father tries to find work, Violeta and Eva prod at the rotting corpse of a squirrel in the underpass.