In the Summers (2024)
Across two decades, an unstable father and two daughters struggle to reconcile
Young women Eva (Sasha Calle) and Violeta (Lio Mehiel) after the storm of their upbringing
In the Summers (2024)
In theaters
Its deceptively simple title hints at why this movie lingers in the mind. It’s about midpoints, where true measure can be lost in too bright sunlight or too deep shadows. That is, during summers. Sometimes it’s only in recollecting them that we can pick out truths the dazzling sun may have blocked out.
Spanning 20 years, In the Summers unfolds in four chapters, each recalling four summers when sisters Violeta and Eva journey from California, where they live with their mother, to spend summers with their father Vicente (René Pérez Joglar) in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Eva and Violeta are played by Luciana Elisa Quinonez and Dreya Castillo as children, by Allison Salinas and Kimaya Thais as adolescents, and by Sasha Calle and Lio Mehiel as young adults.
Astonishingly, even with three actresses in their roles we experience Eva and Violeta as single, slowly maturing individuals. Their casting and the delicately aligned performances are beyond reproach.
Across the years neither sister can quite figure out their distraught papi. In the opening chapter, Vicente picks up his daughters at the airport and drives them back to his large, comfortable adobe-style house, which he’s inherited from his mother.
He’s nervous and also thrilled to reunite with his daughters. They all swim in the backyard pool, play billiards at a nearby bar, pick out Orion in the luminous nighttime New Mexico sky.
Throughout these jaunty interludes Vicente abundantly consumes beer and whisky. One night on the way home he drives erratically and nearly has an accident. Violeta, the elder daughter, shrewdly spots her father’s addiction to alcohol.
Younger daughter Eva adores Vicente and overlooks his shortcomings. Violeta is more ill at ease. She’s gradually coming to terms with her sexual identity and is watchful about who a person claims to be versus who they actually are.
Early on she sees through her father’s too-eager “warmth” and glimpses the self-centered alcoholic he’s working hard to conceal.
At play: Violeta (Dreya Castillo), Eva (Luciana Elisa Quinonez) and papi (René Pérez Joglar)
As summers go by, Vicente becomes more volatile. He explodes in anger when Violeta, expressing “boyishness”, cuts her hair. During a party he mocks her in front of the assembled company for her “mannish” appearance.
By the time Eva and Violeta reach their teenage years, his alcohol and drug abuse turn flagrant, the house becomes more disorderly, the backyard pool fetid and useless. His temper flares at the slightest provocation.
During the second summer, his erratic driving leads to a near-tragic accident, and in response Violeta stays in California for summer number three.
Eva on her own keeps her cool and sadly all but gives up on reaching her father, knowing his “affection” for her is forced, his self-esteem shockingly low. We never learn how he makes a living, only hear that he has trouble finding work.
Vicente scratches at behaving decently, and he isn’t friendless. One long-time companion is Carmen (Emma Ramos), bartender at the local watering hole. She becomes a kind of surrogate parent to the two girls. She’s known Vicente for years and has come to see that for him responsible fatherhood is perpetually out of reach.
Then again, maybe not absolutely. Perhaps hope needn’t ever completely die. By the fourth summer, Vicente has married Yenny (Leslie Grace) and fathered another daughter, Natalia. This new circumstance seems to have quelled his heavy drinking, and Eva and Violeta delightedly show affection for their new half-sister.
Writer-director Samudio’s movie is personally felt but in no way judgmental. She’s interested in showing painful truths, ensuring that no one’s story, however problematic, falls by the wayside or is poked at maliciously.
Violeta, now a graduate student, fully embraces what she now calls her queer identity and in the process of maturing has completely set aside any desire to please or win the approval of her father.
And the beautiful Eva has grown more self-protectively distant. We see her riddled with sadness as Vicente’s powers of perception never mature along with her own, and she can barely speak to her father without tears in her eyes.
If we take all the story’s despair and disillusionment together, somehow it still isn’t a downer. Can a dissolute father and his deeply disillusioned daughters reconcile? Difficult, to say the least.
But we catch sight of faint, frail hope in Vicente’s eyes as he considers his now-grown daughters anew. And they don’t entirely forsake him, because they have no need to do so. As he points out and we can clearly see, they’re okay without him.
Writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio is a debut feature filmmaker whose screenplay was inspired by her own family history; she went through experiences much like those we see here, but in Colombia, with her father and sister.
To her enormous credit, her movie is personally felt but in no way judgmental. She’s interested in showing painful truths, ensuring that no one’s story, however problematic, falls by the wayside or is poked at maliciously.
It’s a fragmented, self-consciously jagged coming of age tale about a family enduring and possibly overcoming deep-rooted wounds. The Spanish spoken goes without subtitles. Our instincts follow the emotional currents.
The last thing this movie needed was more “smoothing”, it’s so skillfully allowed to breathe. At the 2024 Sundance Festival it won the US Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and Samudio was named Best Director.
Joglar, in his acting debut, is remarkable as Vicente. He captures the man’s jittery self-delusion with a harsh truthfulness that keeps the tormented man’s humanity still in view, struggling to live up to what he might be at his best.
His uncompromising work was so mordantly effective that midway, I all but gave up on Vicente, wondering how his daughters could bear his selfishness and wavering sense of duty or care. I wanted to write him off as a scary mess.
Until I realized, right at the midpoint, that the movie was actually centered on Eva and Violeta, and their need to overcome and move on, leaving pity for their father behind. Pity wouldn’t do him or them any good.
This is a fully ripened story where a mixed ending, shown in lifelike precision, feels piercingly real. Life — including those closest to us — can be distressingly like this and still be enfolded, if never entirely “understood”.
The people in the picture were doing their painful, ravaged best. And I felt those behind the camera, while capturing their complexity, pulling for them.
By the end, father and daughters, scarred to be sure, aren’t completely numb. You see the aching question still glimmering behind their tears: Could we heal next summer?