Tarde Para Morir Joven

Recapturing old memories can be challenging, especially when the line between what really happened and what may have happened is so fragile. Like Joanna Hogg's recent film memoir, "The Souvenir," Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor Castillo ("Thursday Till Sunday"), in her third feature Too Late to Die Young (Tarde para morir joven), is uncertain where memory ends and imagination begins. Winner of the award for Best Director at the Locarno Film Festival (the first woman director to win that prize), the moody, elusive coming-of-age drama follows a group of families living in a secluded, non-traditional community at the foot of the Andes Mountains, close to the city of Santiago.

Produced by Rodrigo Teixeira, one of the producers of "Call Me by Your Name," and set in the summer of 1990, the unspoken context of the film is the recent transition of Chile from its unending nightmare of political violence and social unrest under the dictator Pinochet to a burgeoning democracy, open to new possibilities. As exquisitely photographed by Inti Briones ("The Play"), the film is based on Sotomayor's experience of her own childhood. According to the director, "the film is "a collective portrait of a society coming to terms, often messily, with the new opportunities around them. The location is the main character. I grew up in a community that is similar. When democracy arrived to Chile in 1989, my parents decided to move to a commune that was still being constructed."

Reminiscent of Lucretia Martel's "La Ciénaga," the film unfolds in a seemingly uneventful series of episodes, but is steeped in atmosphere and much is going on beneath the surface. Though the film's lack of a stated context often makes us feel as if we are eavesdropping on an intimate gathering like an uninvited guest at a party, the screen pulsates with life, music and joy. Sharing life in the commune, children run and play in their natural surroundings, swim in a makeshift pool, while the adults engage in the day-to-day activities of cooking, listening to music, and planning a party to celebrate the New Year.

The biggest source of contention is whether or not to install a fuel generator and where to obtain a local water source. For the children, life, as Sotomayor expresses it, is "without limits, without borders...listening to people talk, trying to understand things that were definitely not intended for them." The children in the film are all non-professional actors recruited from local communes, but the focus is on sixteen-year-olds Sofía (Demian Hernández) and Lucas (Antar Machado) and the growing awareness of their sexuality (sadly Machado lost his father two days before the shooting began but insisted on continuing). The striking-looking Sofia must contend both with Lucas' attraction to her and with Ignacio (Mathias Oviedo, "Verdados Ocultas," TV series), an older man visiting the commune with whom she has her first sexual experience and her first heartbreak.

The camera follows Sofia as she smokes a cigarette in the bathtub, bathes in a spring beneath a cascading waterfall, reflects silently on her confusing feelings, and converses with her impenetrable father about her desire to move back to the city to live with her mother. The longing look on her face suggests that, like the author Henri Barbusse, she sees "too deep and too much." Ten-year-old Clara (Magdalena Tótoro), another important character, is an unusually expressive child who reveals her deepest feelings non-verbally. She is distraught when her dog Frida runs away, but when she discovers that Frida has been living with a poor family in the city, her joy turns to dismay when the dog no longer responds to the name "Frida" but only to "Cindy," the name her new family bestowed on her.

Too Late to Die Young is a sensitive and haunting film in which the characters are so real and indelibly drawn that, as with many great films, the end brought to me an abiding sense of loss. The tension of the film builds when a break-in occurs and a water-pipe is deliberately blocked and culminates in a fast-spreading forest fire. As Sotomayor put it, "It is the explosion of what has been contained in these early scenes. It also represents the end of an illusion." Unlike the holier-than-thou alienation of the film, "Captain Fantastic," Too Late to Die Young implies that there is no escape from the struggles and challenges of life whether you live in a crowded city or in the middle of a forest. As Bob Dylan said it, "It's life and life only."

When I first listened about this film I could contain my anxiety. The idea of watching a Chilean woman director job, about the problems that some young people could have at my age, but in a different time really got my anxious. I went to the cinema within all the chaos of Marvel´s 'EndGame', but inside the room the closeness was unique. From the first scene I knew that i would love this film, and while it was progressing I really felt connected to the plot and characters. Something that could made me feel that way is that the protagonist is about my age, and that the time it was set generates a lot of tumult here in Chile. Whit this film I could watch a different point of view of the Chilean history, a closer one. I also loved the recording style, one that I have only seen in north american and french films; in that sense I felt proud about the Chilean advance in cinematography. Changing the idea, I did not like the scenes of Magdalena Tótoro. Taking out the fact that she is still a little girl, I felt that she´s parts did not contribute at all in the advance of the plot. Almost like an expansion, this parts were too callow for the level of Dominga Sotomayor as a director. I think that the movie could have been much better without this scenes. For the rest the film is really great, I loved everything else of it, specially the act of Demián Hernández. Hope for them two, Dominga Sotomayor and Demián Hernández, to make more and better films, winning more prizes and having a excellent career. 8/10

I had the opportunity to see this film at MSPIFF and I absolutely adored it. Too Late To Die Young is enchanting yet feels so incredibly realistic. Dominga Sotomayor Castillo shows a complete mastery of her craft to be able to make such an introspective and immersive piece.

Other user reviews talked about the lack of cultural context, but I feel as though they missed the point of the film. It is in no way a political drama. It is, if anything, a film exploring coming-of-age themes, and the freedom that comes in hand with adolescence. The "missing background" is an invalid criticism of the film, because any commentary on Chilean politics is a faint, faint backdrop on what is displayed to us.

I'd highly recommend this film :)

I wouldn't have known precisely, except perhaps from the kinds of hair, clothes, and music tracks, that this story of a Chile country co-op takes place in the early 1990s, after the repressive Pinochet dictatorship has gone.A local audience may have picked up on this, but the filmmakers have deliberately avoided any helpful references. and, maybe because the younger characters grew up in a time when discussion of politics was dangerous, no one seems to be interested in talking about the subject.This can be off putting, as the otherwise mundane activites we see the people doing- playing music, making love, taking baths, putting out fires- fails to spark much interest.A much better film from Sweden, Together, made its portrait of the foibles and tensions in a communal group memorable.Here the co-op idea, which was apparently widespread in the years before Pinochet under the socialist Allende, is retested and that 6os-70s idea is challenged,but not in such an interesting way.A big black dog that keeps trying to escape looms as some kind of a symbol, though not as intriguing as the similarly used wolf in the Italian film Happy as Lazzaro, also from 2018,which I saw the same week as this one.

The story is pretty bad, honestly there is nothing to say, what a waste of timeeeee