It’s easy to see why Alessandra Lacorazza’s intimate, profound debut feature, In the Summers, was a festival favorite at Sundance this year, winning the Grand Jury Prize for drama. This lovely little family film packs a lot of authentic emotion into its tiny frame, and features a wealth of strong performances by actors of multiple generations. The simple truths it reveals will hit hard for those who have experienced similarly complicated relationships with estranged families who are both loved and resented.
When we first meet Vincente (rapper Residente aka René Pérez), he’s nervously shifting around in his car. He looks like someone in need of a fix or a stiff drink. And maybe he does, but in this case, he’s anxious at the arrival of his young daughters, Violeta and Eva (Dreya Castillo and Luciana Elisa Quinonez respectively), dropped off by their mother to hang with their father for the hot Las Cruces summer. In their formative years, both girls race to hug their dad upon seeing him. We see Vincente’s house, inherited from his late mother and frequently littered with beer cans. He fills their days with fun; letting them swim in the backyard pool, taking them out for pizza, and teaching them to shoot billiards at his favorite local bar.
Vincente seems like a cool dad, but it’s in the little details that we know something is off. He orders a full pitcher of beer at the bar, much to the chagrin of his friend and bartender, Carmen (Emma Ramos), who becomes a sort of surrogate mom to the girls. He also likes to drive erratically and gets easily frustrated when things don’t go perfectly. When Violeta cuts her hair tomboy short, an early sign of her burgeoning queerness, Vincente flies into a rage.
In the Summers is about family legacy and the lessons passed down over the years. So while Vincente teaches his girls to shoot pool, they’re also picking up things from him that he might not have intended. The next time we see Violeta and Eva (now played by Kimaya Thais and Allison Salinas), they have grown up enough to know that dad is far from perfect. Violeta is becoming more independent as she explores her sexuality, something Vincente doesn’t seem to care about; while Eva still yearns for her father’s love and affection, but finds his alcoholism to be a detriment, not to mention his attention on another family he is building with a new woman (Leslie Grace). But Eva is also her father’s daughter, and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Lacorazza breaks down In the Summers into four distinct chapters, four summers in the trio’s lives. It’s unclear how much time has passed between them, but each segment builds upon the last. So by the time we get to the fourth, when the girls are young adults (played by Mutt breakout Lio Mehiel and The Flash star Sasha Calle), they have become women with their eyes wide open about Vincente. With each visit, the pool gets a little more shallow, the water dirtier than the last, a visible metaphor for their fraying relationship.
Violeta and Eva always have one another, though. One can imagine the other months when they don’t have to deal with Vincente, and these summers become like a tortured obligation they must suffer through. As the girls get older, Vincente becomes increasingly uncomfortable around them, as if he can only relate to them on a childlike level. And we see that dynamic repeated later when a new addition to the family arrives to complicate matters. But this causes Violeta and Eva to grow closer, even as they couldn’t be more different.
Nothing about In the Summers is uncomplicated. Vincente is a bad father but not the stereotypical Hollywood version of one. He doesn’t hit them or physically abuse them; he doesn’t deny Violeta’s queerness, and he genuinely seems to try and be the best father he can be. But he’s also a macho guy who doesn’t know how to express his feelings; he parties and drinks too much, and can’t relate to his daughters as adult women. Vincente is a smart man; he knows science and math so well that he tutors on the side. But he struggles to put things into words with his daughters. Lacorazza has him switch languages, from English to Spanish, to show this frustration. He’s more comfortable speaking Spanish, even if his daughters aren’t. At times, you can see in his face this realization that he’s failed them but doesn’t know how to put it into words. You can see it in their faces that they know what he wants to say.
But Lacorazza doesn’t make them say anything. They don’t need to make things easier for Vincente. When he screws up in a nearly-fatal fashion, one of the sisters simply doesn’t show up the following summer. It’s a consequence that shows their independence from Vincente, but also from one another. In the Summers, which features a revelatory performance by Residente and all of the actresses playing Violeta and Eva, is about embracing the pain of having a dysfunctional family and getting stronger from it. If Lacorazza occasionally goes too far in teasing the most ominous turns, and the dialogue is a bit cliche, the subtle insights more than outweigh them. Being a parent is tough, but being the child of a parent who isn’t equipped for the job is tougher. In the Summers isn’t concerned with assigning blame, but it does suggest that living a rich, full life with those you can count on is the best response.