‘In the Summers’ Review: Ties That Bond, and Fray

Cinema favors melodrama, and so fathers and children often engage in big arguments and reconciliations on screen. Writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s In the Summers manages a singularly painful approach to this subject matter, as it’s less concerned with a great fracture than an ongoing erosion. The film has its harrowing moments, but no episode is coded as the moment of fissure in this family. The father keeps doing what he does, his eccentricities and liabilities growing more tedious and negligent, and the children’s love is gradually tempered with frustration, anger, resentment, and, most poignantly, pity.

Setting her film across four summer visits over a period of 20 years, Lacorazza Samudio manages the illusion of capturing a man’s diminishment in something like real time. At the beginning of each episode, we see Vicente (Renè Pérez Joglar) picking up his daughters, Violet and Eva, in front of the small airport in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where he’s returned from Puerto Rico after inheriting his mother’s house. Each summer includes several rituals, such as a visit to a local bar run by Vicente’s old friend, Carmen (Emma Ramos), a lesbian from whom Violeta will eventually seek support as her own queer identity emerges.

Vicente plays billiards with the girls at the bar, drinks too much, and is quietly reprimanded by Carmen, especially if he insists on driving them home. As the girls grow up, they fight Vicente, somewhat, over his volatile habits. Each episode features forlorn shots of the swimming pool at Vicente’s home, as it devolves from pristine to swampy to an empty graveyard pockmarked by weeds and toys, un-fussily reflecting the diminishing relationship between father and daughters.

Vicente’s drinking goes from “maybe that was merely a bad night” to reckless and habitual, and as everyone grows older and angrier their attention to one another strays. As patterns are repeated, especially the opening ritual of the airport pick-up, a slow-dawning suspense emerges. Like friends and family in real life whom we haven’t seen in a while, we are primed to anticipate how the girls will age, and how Vicente’s ascendant demons will continue to eat him alive.

Such episodes compose the entirety of In the Summers. One of the film’s great strengths resides in Lacorazza Samudio’s confidence in her details to speak for themselves, without the need of plot gimmickry. The attention paid here to setting and performance is remarkable for a veteran filmmaker, let alone a newcomer. The Las Cruces of cinematographer Alejandro Mejía’s lens is a sparse, dried-out realm that is not without comfort and beauty. It seems to have a pleasing smallness that can very easily encourage people like Vicente to settle into a rut.

Carmen’s bar is especially comforting, at least before Vicente grows hostile, as Lacorazza Samudio captures how intensely assuring such a cavern can be to an estranged person needing a home away from home where they know the staff and, in qualified terms, can be somebody. Nesting alongside the comforts of this setting are the constrictions: the mundanity, the sameness, the miles of commandingly spartan yet monotonous landscapes that seem to hold little apart from a few trailers and gas stations. In its deft mixture of western tones and textures, In the Summers recalls Allison Anders’s Gas Food Lodging.

Violet and Eva are played by three pairs of actresses across the running time of the film: Luciana Elisa Quinonez, Allison Salinas, and Sasha Calle as Eva, and Dreya Castillo, Kimaya Thais, and Lio Mehiel as Violeta. As the adults, Calle and Mehiel anchor In the Summers, but all of the actors are convincing, especially in communicating Eva and Violeta’s swelling alienation from their father. As Vicente, Joglar, better known by his stage name Residente, captures something that’s very difficult to play without going maudlin: how someone can behave very badly while seeing themselves as a victim, prioritizing their ego above all other concerns.

Vicente is a failure—a divorcee living in his mother’s home, an alcoholic and probably a drug addict—whose desperation to be the father of what he presumes to be his girls’ imagination can easily turn to bitterness. Joglar is especially effective in rendering the aggression that exists in Vicente’s eagerness to please. Across In the Summers, we watch a man who loves his daughters but who nevertheless feels forced by his self-hatred to do a bad impression of a loving dad, which has the unsurprising effect of pushing them away. Joglar gives a quick, manic, edgy and, yes, charming performance, but it’s one that’s never too quick, or manic, or edgy. Throughout, Joglar renders an ever-shifting spectrum of minute and conflicting emotions. Like many alcoholics, Vicente is essentially a needy, selfish child, and Joglar plays him that way.

The performances by Joglar, Calle, and Mehiel give the film’s most pointed line of dialogue the weight of a fleeting catharsis. Vicente observes that the girls have done well without him. The line wouldn’t be moving if it was delivered with self-pity, as it would scan merely as Vicente indulging in his manipulative tricks. Instead, it’s stated flatly as truth, seemingly out of nowhere. For a moment, Vicente has the decency to face himself, recognizing that he’s aged from the fun guy in his child’s lives to a reckless clown, a chore to be gotten over with in between other obligations. This is a man recognizing that he’s allowed himself to become a ghost.