Sumario
Este drama (que algunos califican como thriller) sobre la visita de un primo que perturba la vida de dos hermanas y su tía quizás ponga sus cartas sobre la mesa demasiado pronto, resintiendo en parte el crescendo dramático de la película. No obstante, logra algunos buenos picos de tensión y un realista tratamiento de la sexualidad y el deseo adolescentes.
Review
Juana and Mara, two orphaned teenage sisters aged 17 and 14, respectively (Malena Filmus and Lola Abraldes), live with their aunt Inés (Umbra Colombo, star of the recent Azul el mar) on a farm dedicated to beekeeping, producing and marketing honey. The arrival of Lucio, the sisters' cousin (Franco Rizzaro), alters the delicate balance in which the three of them lived together.
The arrival of an "intruder" to an isolated and closed family system and the interactions that he produces with its members could be considered as a literary and cinematographic subgenre. The approach to the behavior of people in situations of rural isolation is also a topic, as if it arouses atavisms and violence that remain repressed in the urban environments of origin.
One thinks of illustrious antecedents such as Borges's La intrusa (and its film adaptations) or Pasolini's Theorem. They arise for me among the immediate references of this film The Sleepwalkers, by Paula Hernández, where the irruption of a cousin also triggers chaos, although in a more complex family environment. And the backdrop of the bees casually refers to The Cloud, the remarkable French film that combines family drama with horror.
Perhaps as in one of those references, but in a feminine key, the inevitable triangle of the sisters with the cousin soon reveals an unexpected vertex, whose development also coincides with an affective crisis of her aunt, which makes her more absent as a family authority, in a subplot whose function would seem to be to justify that absence.
The three adolescents refer to their sexuality (and in part they exercise it) spontaneously and without euphemisms (one of the successes of the film), in a story that stages the coming of age of one of the sisters.
The problem with Lucas Turturro's feature debut is that he puts his cards on the table perhaps too soon; somehow, the director seems to prefer that we know that the road to disaster is served and that we live that journey as possible and see if it is inevitable from the balance of the forces unleashed. But he fails a bit (partly for that reason) in his dramatic crescendo, which he intends to enrich with certain revelations. However, the outcome looks between dry and precipitous and with some point not sufficiently clarified. This does not mean that there are some peaks of tension achieved, with good performances from the leading quartet.
