A moving feature debut, “In the Summers” comes from writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza, pulling threads from her own childhood and family story to make a new tapestry. Watching it, I thought of something the playwright Steven Dietz once said in an interview, paraphrased as: Don’t write what you know. Write what you need to discover.
Lacorazza has done that here, and the result is a modest but sure collection of tangled memories, dramatized. The structure’s simple. The feelings are not.
Lacorazza spans roughly two decades in the lives of Violeta and Eva, sisters living with their mother (who does not appear in the story) in Los Angeles. Their father, Vicente, is in Las Cruces, New Mexico, whose house inherited from his mother has a pool out back and plenty of room for the girls to visit. “In the Summers” deals with four of those visits over the years, using three different sets of actors: Dreya Castillo, Kimaya Thais Limon and Lío Mehiel as Violeta, and Luciana Elisa Quiñonez, Allison Salinas and Sasha Calle as Eva.
The movie consists of four summers, with several-year jumps between them. Vicente’s anxious anticipation of the first of these visits is indicated by a quick series of details, as he tidies the house and waits in the car, smoking, at the airport. “In the Summers” relies on little of the customary exposition you tend to find in films like this.
Vicente, we learn offhandedly, tends to be in and out of work, but mostly out. He’s a probable al.
