This tricky but not tricksy feature debut for writer/director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio is a lightly dramatised account of the summers spent with her sister visiting her dad in New Mexico. Tricky because it’s a film about a lack rather than a presence, a failure to connect on both sides – though both dad and the kids do score points for trying.
Done sometimes as snapshots, at other times as more extended scenes from a life, the story is told through the eyes of the two sisters who arrive in Las Cruces every year, to stay with dad while their mother back home in California – never seen or heard – does whatever footloose mothers do. Violetta, smart and butch, Eva younger, prettier and more delicate but crucially not her daddy’s favourite – that’s the “smart” Violetta who has her dad’s brains. Eva has her mother’s looks.
Lacorazza Samudio drops in on them three/four times, as proper children, where dad lets them off the leash and indulges them with all the stuff their mother probably doesn’t allow. Lots of pizza. Then, as teenagers, Violetta discovering her sexuality, Eva realising dad’s just not that interested in her. Then there’s one miserable visit that Eva makes on her own. Finally, the pair of them – closer than ever – as adults back for what is possibly the last time with their dad who seems slightly chastened – he’s given up the booze – and is shakily attempting to clean up his act.
Lacorazza Samudio sketches in the basics of father Vicente and Puerto Rican rapper/actor Residente takes it from there, adding shading and bringing this mixed bag of a guy – a drunk but a mostly loving dad, an enthusiast for science and mathematics – who’s a complex mix of the intellectual and the street fighter. When is it going to kick off with Vicente always seems to be the question.
On the girls’ side, three different pair of actors play them, and while all are exceptional, the bulk of the filigree playing lands with Lio Mehiel (as the adult Violetta) and Sasha Calle (Eva), as a pair of young women realising that the power dynamic is with them.
Throughout there’s a sense of things not clicking. The girls are slightly in awe of their dad and slightly terrified by him. He’s a womaniser and not particularly paternal but he does try. A decent man fighting himself.
There are other performances to savour, in particular Emma Ramos as the owner of a local bar where Vicente hangs out and who becomes something of a mother substitute for both Eva and Violetta.
It is the tender and poignant coming-of-ager but the writer/director is not pointing fingers or apportioning blame for anything, even though dad at one point crashes the car and seriously injures Violetta. Its claims to specialness come from the way it presents New Mexico as somehow both spectacular and dog-eared. It’s a good looking film but in an unshowy way.
The betwixt and betweenness is really what it’s all about. Dad does not ever quite connect with either of his girls and they, for all the adventures they have – gazing at the stars, heading off to see awesome vistas – would probably on the whole rather be back in California.
So a relationship that isn’t quite there, a portrait of the spaces between people rather than the people themselves. At one point I wonder whether it was Eva or Violetta who’s the stand-in for Lacorazza Samudio. It’s Violetta, it would seem, reading an interview with the director, though you could be forgiven for thinking it was Eva, since so much of the emotional damage being thoughtlessly meted out is going her way. Poor Eva.
In the Summers – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
