‘In the Summers’ Review: Residente as an Imperfect Divorced Dad

At the beginning of “In the Summers,” Vicente is anxious. Sitting in his car, obsessively flicking his lighter, absently tapping his hand on the steering wheel to calm his nerves, this working-class man stares out the window, waiting. The most important time of the year for Vicente is about to begin—the season that defines him. His two young daughters are finally coming out of the airport, and he’s going to greet them with enthusiasm. Summer is the time when he becomes a father. Summer is his chance to prove himself.

Told in four chapters over a period of just under twenty years, Colombian-American writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza’s magnificent feature debut may recall other singular indies like “Moonlight” and “Aftersun” in structure and themes, but this deceptively modest autobiographical drama is so precise and insightful that it comfortably occupies its own emotional landscape. It’s a film about this father, but it’s also about his little girls, who won’t be so little for long.

The first chapter lays out the film’s narrative framework. Vicente (played by rapper René Pérez Joglar, who records under the name Residente) lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in his late mother’s house. He moved there at some point after his divorce from his wife, and now he’s been granted custody of Eva (Luciana Quinonez) and her older sister Violeta (Dreya Renae Castillo), who normally reside with their mother in California, only during the summers. Eva and Violeta may be elementary school age, still impressionable enough to admire their gregarious, affectionate father, but they can detect the slight cracks in his jovial exterior. Vicente drinks a little too much, farts a little too easily. He wants his girls to have a good time in Las Cruces, but what he really wants is for them to know that he’s a great father. The divorce is never mentioned, but Vicente is still fighting that battle.

The first segment ends on a curious and ambiguous note—Violeta impulsively decides to cut her hair short, angering her conservative father—which will inform much of what follows. Over the next three chapters, in much the same way as “Moonlight,” “In the Summers” continues to jump forward in time. Eva and Violeta will return to Las Cruces—the two sisters don’t always make the trip, though—as we witness the shift in this father-daughter relationship during these pivotal summers. (Older actors play the girls in later chapters.) Lacorazza is a filmmaker who values ​​demonstration over narrative, resisting grand speeches that expose the characters’ state of mind. Instead, a few images that repeat throughout the chapters explain everything. Just watch the once-pristine pool in Vicente’s backyard gradually deteriorate from neglect.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the Best Director Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, “In the Summers” draws on Lacorazza’s memories of her late father. The film’s most shocking moment, a car ride that serves as a disturbing finale to the second half, played out almost exactly the same way in real life. A filmmaker who draws on personal experience can sometimes suffer from a lack of perspective — she knows these incidents so intimately, but the audience is left out — but once the structure of this richly observed and patiently crafted drama becomes apparent, each new chapter has a gripping suspense.

How have the three characters changed since we last saw them? And how might this new summer heal (or deepen) the invisible wounds inflicted in the previous chapter? Lacorazza’s film is a film of gradations, with the daughters of the later chapters subtly carrying the cumulative disappointment and stubborn love these women still harbor for their flawed fathers. Vicente and his daughters struggle to speak directly to the fault lines that have accumulated over the years between them. Lacorazza maintains this tension, the sad smiles of his characters speaking volumes.

The actors who play Eva and Violeta are all superb, especially Sasha Calle and Lío Mehiel in the final chapter, which highlights Lacorazza’s meditation on resignation and acceptance. But Vicente de Pérez Joglar, like Paul MescalCalum is troubled in “After sun” is both the film’s centerpiece and its greatest mystery. A maddening mix of good intentions and self-destructive tendencies—a self-indulgent sensibility and an unforgivable meanness—Vicente has a keen mind for mathematics, physics, and astronomy that he loves to share with his daughters. But played by Pérez Joglar, making his feature film debut, this proud father is also consumed by the conviction that life has never given him a fair chance, and he takes that resentment out on everyone around him. It’s a performance full of repressed bitterness, and the pain comes into sharper focus when Vicente acknowledges that his children will grow up and stop adoring their father unconditionally. As much as he tries to convince them that he’s a great father, he can’t hide his failings—including his inability to hold down a job or a partner—but it’s his insistence on sustaining this illusion that becomes the film’s tragedy. Much like his daughters, we never really see Vicente in his entirety because he is so determined to hide.

But families have a way of understanding each other that not all of us can grasp. Interestingly, Lacorazza chooses not to include subtitles for the film’s Spanish dialogue. Vicente sometimes uses Spanish with his daughters, who know what he’s saying but prefer to speak in English. “I made that choice to allow the audience to engage in emotions that transcend language,” Lacorazza explained, and for those who don’t speak Spanish (like this reviewer), it has the desired effect.

But it also adds an extra grace note to this delicate, sophisticated portrait of class, sexuality and parenthood. There may be moments in “In the Summers” when you don’t understand everything that’s being said. But the characters, yes, share a private language of familial dysfunction and unspoken angst. The rest of us can watch — we can even understand the gist of their conversations — but their world is their own. It’s a testament to this deeply moving film that Lacorazza lays bare his own complicated feelings about his father while acknowledging that, as a quietly shattering final scene shows, words sometimes fail.