Surprises that cinema sometimes offers: a film set in a remote town in Costa Rica, an environment that is no longer rural but jungle, which seems to be placed in thematic, character and environmental situations close to La Niña Santa from the start , by Lucrecia Martel, and Nazarín, by Luis Buñuel, and who eventually converge with none other than Carrie, by Brian de Palma. That this unexpected dramatic and referential turn also appears in a first film offers sufficient indication of the uniqueness of its director, the novel Nathalie Álvarez Mesén. Clara Sola, the story of a woman’s sexual awakening with supposed healing powers.
More information
“I don’t want to operate on her. God sent it that way, and that’s how I want to leave it.” The phrase, horrible and somber, uttered by a mother regarding her daughter’s serious spinal problems, belonged to Clara Sola, but he could have heard it too The ultra-Catholic and insane parent played by Piper Laurie in the chilling work of Palme Carrie White was a teenager who wasn’t even told about her period when she got it during gym class; he had paranormal powers involved with telekinesis and ended up suffering the turmoil of college bullying the moment he began to become aware of his body, gender and sentimental feelings.
However, Clara, who uses her mother as a saint with healing energy, is 40 years old. However, her wits and knowledge do not extend much further than that of a little calf, perhaps due to having an autism spectrum disorder in a very poor environment, or simply due to the oppression she has been subjected to by her harpy mother’s extreme shyness and alarming ignorance. Her sexual awakening, coupled with a strange mysticism, also provokes in her a sort of female liberation, happy and abrupt, in a context unsuitable for autonomy.
With tenderness Álvarez Mesén, who presented his work at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes 2021, surrounds his tall and sacred girl with elements that combine the magical, the spiritual and the deeply earthly. A triangle that, in its most mundane corner, develops into two other very different aspects: the first, based on the atavistic (water, earth and fire as the determining ingredients), and the second, on the purely popular (soap operas and “their cochinadas” ) , the party dresses). And if Carrie culminated at a high school graduation, Clara Sola does so with a Latin parallelism: a quinceañera celebration that, how could it be otherwise, ends with a vengeance that perhaps has less to do with the magical realism of the area has than with the militant cinephilia of its director.
Clare alone
Direction: Nathalie Alvarez Mesen.
Interpreter: Wendy Chinchilla, Daniel Castaneda, Ana Julia Porras, Flor Vargas.
Gender: Theatre. Costa Rica, 2021.
Duration: 106 minutes.
Premiere: May 20th.
All the culture that suits you awaits you here.
Subscribe to
Exclusive content for subscribers
read limitless