A backyard swimming pool is the centerpiece of “In the Summers,” a debut feature by Colombian American writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio. It begins as a cool, crowded place of joy and ends as a neglected eyesore sinking into disrepair an aptly somber emblem for time’s passage in this unsentimental but deeply moving film about difficult parents and their children. The story unfolds over four elliptical segments spanning roughly two decades.
The Puerto Rican urban music star René Pérez Joglar, who has won multiple Grammys under his stage name Residente and was half of the now disbanded group Calle 13, plays Vicente. The nonchalant father lives in Las Cruces, N.M., alone amid a largely Latino population in this sleepy desert town. With a cigarette behind his ear and great enthusiasm, he picks up his daughters Violeta and Eva (played as children by Dreya Castillo and Luciana Elisa Quinonez), who have arrived from California for the summer, from the minuscule local airport.
This first chapter is built on seemingly inconsequential moments that will eventually form the foundation of how the girls see their father, as his image slowly deteriorates over the years in which the narrative moves. He teaches them to play pool and cook eggs; takes them stargazing, gives in to juvenile silliness to connect with them. These quiet scenes of family intimacy mark Lacorazza Samudio as a director with an uncanny knack for letting character development arise from lived-in behavior rather than dialogue.
“I’m from here,” he assures his little girls when they ask why he stays in Las Cruces. And while Puerto Rico may be where he’s actually from, it’s where along with that pool he lives now, having inherited this house from his late mother. For Violeta and Eva, this dry place is all but synonymous with their father, who rarely appears to them without the people and things that offer him an enervating comfort, which also keeps him from growing.
Addiction doesn’t get the better of him at first, neither does the baggage of a failed relationship. But that won’t last. Pérez Joglar has never before taken on such a substantial film role (he had a cameo in “Old Dogs” in 2009), but as a performer who has directed many of his own music videos, he brings each of Vicente’s shifts to life with an earthy intensity from the man who seems overly confident about self-improvement to the wild tantrums begetting dangerously neglectful spells and then the vulnerability of someone who must grapple with having irrevocably failed themselves.
Samudio doesn’t overburden her screenplay inspired by her own history with her father and sister with accounts of what happened offscreen, which fractured this family into pieces. She prefers scenes whose barely contained chaos expresses familiar weaknesses of character that seem oddly at odds with the pictures around them. Occasionally Alejandro Mejía’s precisely framed shots draw our gaze to a horizon line placed just so, one that might seem intended to provide some steadiness missing from these characters’ home lives. To announce each new chapter and time jump, Lacorazza Samudio supplies us with a shot of an altar in transition different objects for different phases accompanied by jaunty Latin tunes, sometimes achieving an unnerving effect.
After a few years, teenager Violeta (played fiercely by Kimaya Thais) finds solace in Carmen (Emma Ramos), a lesbian bar owner and lifelong friend of Vicente as she begins to explore her queer identity. Her encounters with Vicente feel more tumultuous than ever, filled with shared, relentless hostility. When her father has another daughter with his girlfriend Yenny (Leslie Grace from “In the Heights”), adolescent Eva (Allison Salinas) sees his attention drift away from her maybe this time he’ll get it right.
It’s two beautifully haunted performances by Sasha Calle of (“The Flash”) as Eva and Lio Mehiel (the lead in Sundance 2023’s “Mutt”) as Violeta that bring the sisters home in their final chapter as adults. But these turns would have no weight were it not for the emotional groundwork, and believable baggage, laid out by the young artists who played them earlier in the film.
For once patched-up wounds reopened along the way, they’re met with a bittersweet view of their father. Each return visit is met with tension, sometimes apathy but always an ounce of true warmth between them that keeps getting them through the door in hopes of reigniting their bond for good. What goes unspoken in this sharply empathetic drama, though shot through Calle’s mournful eye contact and Mehiel’s pitying glances at Pérez Joglar‘s woefully convincing Vicente, is sometimes all love can do is remember.
“In The Summers”-type projects could open up a new wave of stories about Latinos in America that aren’t predicated on an exceptional character (as compared to multiple inspirational Latino biopics released in 2023), but instead find their creative spine within everyday folks’ ups and downs. It is personal films like “In The Summers,” confidently made debuts that should set filmmakers up for other such empathetic outputs in the future.
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