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 alcoholic. He’s tender and a born mentor with his girls, when it comes to the everyday business of cracking eggs over a skillet, or learning how to shoot pool down at his preferred bar. (Emma Ramos plays Carmen, the bartender who has known Vicente a long time.)
Vicente is also a source of tension and worry. He drives recklessly, for laughs, with the girls in the car late at night. He’s an eggshell parent; the girls, very different personalities caught in the same familial guessing game, must learn to read his moods, gauge his drinking, protect their spirits. Through the years, Vicente acquires a new partner and a new daughter, the girls’ stepsister. This is not an easy development, especially for Violeta, who remains at odds with her father through the years and the summers.
A lot happens, some of it life-changing, some of it heartrending, parts of it (in story terms) a bit rushed or on-the-nose. The actors, unerringly well-cast, more or less take care of those last parts. As Vicente, the rapper and vocalist Residente, aka René Pérez Joglar, makes a strong feature debut, straining sometimes to accommodate his character’s volatile mixture of qualities but always with a true and beating heart. As the years pass Vicente can’t keep track of where his girls are in school. The movie doesn’t make a big deal about it, but it’s the sort of lived-in detail that makes Lacorazza’s calling card worth holding on to, whether you’re a divorced parent, a here-and-there child with a tricky family tree —or just a filmgoer interested in a good story without a lot of narrative machinery getting in the way.
“In the Summers” — 3 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating (some language and sexual material)
Running time: 1:35
How to watch: Premieres in theaters Sept. 27
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.