Simple yet subtle and complex, I Have Electric Dreams (Tengo Sueños Eléctricos) is a Costa Rican coming-of-ager and the debut feature by Valentina Maurel, who has said she wanted to make a movie exploring the ambiguities of adolescence. Mission accomplished.
Maurel drops us straight into the world of her “heroine”, Eva (Daniela Marín Navarro) and leaves us to figure out what’s going on. We meet Eva and her little sister being driven home by her seething father, who, by the end of this introduction, has lost his tempter entirely and is banging his head against the garage door until he’s drawn blood. The central relationship of the movie is Eva and father Martin (Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez), a short-fused would-be bohemian poet who has moved out of the family home.
Dad may be frightening but Eva wants to live with him, she says. Maybe it’s a heartfelt wish, maybe it’s a way of getting at her mother, Anca (Vivian Rodríguez Barquero), who says Eva takes after her father in ways that worry her. And, in light of that, maybe there’s a touch of masturbatory self-loving going on there too – Eva loves her dad because he reminds her of herself. Who knows?
Though Maurel keeps the pot stirring with a rushing, lively camera, she also keeps the focus tight on whoever’s at the centre of a given scene. Eva and her mother, Eva and her sister, Eva and her father, each one in a tight, little, claustrophobic world.
There is a throughline. Since Eva wants to live with her dad, it follows that he needs a place where she can have a room. It’s on this thread that the movie is strung, with Eva proposing one place after another and Martin rejecting them all for reasons (too expensive, too remote, horrible landlord, too small) that might be a way of avoiding telling his daughter that he’s not as keen on the idea as she is.
Betweentimes she hangs out either at home, where the cat, Kwesi (evidently dad’s onetime cat, since he has the music of reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson always on in the car) is making a nuisance of himself, and mum Anca is taking spiteful potshots at Eva, her hopes, her fears and even her physique. Eva’s breasts aren’t big enough, apparently, “you got those from your dad”.
And when Eva’s not there she’s hanging with dad and his partying drugtaking, bohemian friends, a gaggle of artistic, would-be writers whose sexual ethics don’t stretch as far as not taking a crack at a friend’s juvenile daughter.
Maurel has said she based Eva partly on her own experiences growing up with artistic parents and how the coming-of-age bit of coming of age is the realisation that there is no real coming of age at all. Adults can be childish, kids can be grown-up. Circumstances dictate, to an extent, as well as character.
It’s this break with the standard approach to the coming-of-age movie that makes the movie so refreshing. It’s also quietly a lot more technically accomplished than the handheld camera – which hides a thousand sins – at first lets on. Careful colour grading always giving us a nudge into the emotional territory Maurel wants us to be in.
I was amazed that the actors were all either first timers or had very little experience behind them. Reinaldo Amien, who plays Martin, had done one short when he signed on, and he’s a veteran compared to most of the rest of them. His performance as the thwarted, bitter Martin is superb, but so is Daniela Marín Navarro’s as the naive but formidable Eva. And so is Vivian Rodríguez Barquero’s as the purse-lipped, elegant and not-entirely horrible mother. Also worth mentioning in despatches is José Pablo Segreda Johanning as Dove, the plubby, likeable friend of Martin.
The brilliant online movie resource Cineuropa named I Have Electric Dreams as one of the best of 2022, alongside the likes of Aftersun, Rimini and The Quiet Girl. That’s not a bad crowd to he hanging out with.
I Have Electric Dreams (Tengo Sueños Eléctricos) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
