Review: Too Late to Die Young Keeps Politics, and Its Audience, at a Distance

Dominga Sotomayor’s Too Late to Die Young constructs a vivid portrait of a rural commune in the summer of 1990 in Chile. The community and lifestyle presented here corresponds to Sotomayor’s childhood, which helps explain why the film feels like a potent memory conjured up from the subconscious, rather than a pointed summation of the political transformation of the era in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s fall from power.

Knowledge of that historic event is something that Sotomayor trusts viewers to bring to the film. It’s a tall task to evoke a multifaceted subject—Chile’s newfound freedom as it impacts three different generations—entirely through autobiographical vignettes, and Too Late to Die Young, which would feel like just another nostalgic coming-of-age tale were it not for the specificity of Sotomayor’s recollections, doesn’t quite crystalize on this front. And yet, the film is too arresting in its sense of period detail and texture to register as a missed opportunity.

The milieu occupied by rebellious 16-year-old Sofia (Demian Hernández) is a makeshift jumble of post-and-beam cabins in the foothills outside Santiago, the living spaces suggesting a cross between the dreamy treehouse from Terrence Malick’s Badlands and the farmstead from Ulrich Kohler’s In My Room. It’s a uniquely liminal setting for a story about the search for independence, one where the lack of boundaries can be both liberating and invasive.

For Sofia, fast approaching womanhood, the oppressive aspects of her living arrangement appear to be weighing on her more than others. Seemingly longing for escape, she’s often taking the beat-up family vehicle for trips around the commune’s dusty margins, and when Ignacio (Matías Oviedo), a hunk from a neighborhood closer to town, starts making appearances around the camp, she’s attracted both to him and what she imagines to be his promise of adventure. Lucas (Antar Machado), Sofia’s on-again-off-again boyfriend, is less thrilled with Ignacio’s arrival, and Too Late to Die Young partially takes shape as an awkward love triangle that exposes the different stages of romantic and sexual development between these three characters. To the extent that it pursues the conflicts of this narrative thread, the film does so largely through gestures and glances, withholding confrontational dialogue until suppressed frustrations and resentments finally surface in a predictable third-act face-to-face between Lucas and Sofia that precipitates a larger breakdown within the community.

Though Too Late to Die Young ultimately coalesces around this romantic subplot at a New Year’s Eve gathering, it’s not exactly Sotomayor’s central focus. In the spirit of the co-op, the filmmaker spreads her attention around liberally between different groups of people: the adults, including Sofia’s taciturn, divorced father, Roberto (Andrés Aliaga), whose conversations revolve around practical concerns of electricity and water supplies; Sofia’s peers, who smoke weed and cigarettes, play music, and socialize around campfires; and the younger children, who generally seem to delight in their natural surroundings, riding bikes and go-karts around the woods and playing impromptu games. One of these kids, the wise-beyond-her-years 10-year-old Clara (Magdalena Tótoro), even gets her own subplot. In the hypnotizing slow-motion tracking shot that precedes the opening title, her beloved sheepdog loses its way from the family vehicle and doesn’t return; later, Clara’s mother, Carmen (Mercedes Mujica), attempts, in dubious fashion, to reunite her daughter with her pet.

All these loose storylines, however, are somewhat tangential to the main attraction of Too Late to Die Young: Sotomayor’s impressionistic style, for which credit must be shared with cinematographer Inti Briones, who also lensed Raúl Ruiz’s Night Across the Street and Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet. The film’s gentle, salmon-tinted color scheme, in which sun-dappled foliage emits the muted softness of an Auguste Renoir painting, is a thing of beauty, and Sotomayor appears to have picked up some of the off-kilter compositional strategies of Lucrecia Martel. We’re often only seeing one carefully selected portion of a given scene, in which characters shuffle in and out, and left to imagine with the help of off-screen sound what lies on the periphery. Combined with Sotomayor’s use of shallow depth of field, this approach to framing approximates her characters’, and specifically Sofia’s, narrowed environment. Here, Santiago is effectively only a twinkling streak of bokeh on the distant horizon.

While strikingly detailed, however, this shrinking of the outside world has the side effect of further abstracting the narrative’s political context, and thus cutting short the potential resonance of Sofia, Lucas, and Clara’s unique predicaments. Does Sotomayor have an obligation to make her film’s subtexts immediately decipherable to those unversed in Chilean history in 1990? Of course not. But as it stands, the experience of watching Too Late to Die Young is not unlike entering a stranger’s dream without an anchor.