Latin American cinema is back in force in Brussels with the first feature film by Costa Rican Valentina Maurel, "Tengo sueños eléctricos". A film moist, sensitive, where teenage illusions are confronted with the challenges of being an adult.
© Cinéart
"I have electric dreams, in which my father, when he can not fix something, crushes it to the ground". Eva is a teenager who lives with her mother and sister in San Jose. Recently divorced, her father, an impulsive and violent man, is trying to rebuild his life. Fascinated by this father figure, a drifting poet, who seems to respond to a certain adolescent ideal, Eva builds herself in his shadow to finally find her own space.
After two short films on adolescence and father-daughter relationships, Valentina Maurel continues to explore the teenage years, this painful and progressive unraveling of childhood ideals. In the same vein, the director questions the stability of adulthood, with these ambivalent parental figures, stuck in their own lives, far from linear projections and model roles.
Awarded at the Locarno Film Festival for best direction, the work on the composition of the characters is flawless. The director gives them a freedom, which makes these flayed beings absolutely endearing. Love and brutality are constantly present, both in human relationships and in the urban chaos where the love songs of the mariachis cover the noise of street fights. "We love each other with blows, we love each other with screams", writes Eva in one of her poems.
The action, totally focused on human relationships, gives the film a timeless dimension, devoid of the markers of our time. This refocusing on what it is to be human, without artifice, but also without moral judgment, accentuates the raw aspect of "Tengo sueños eléctricos".
The French-Costa Rican director, who graduated from INSAS (Brussels cinema school), brilliantly breaks free from the codes often assigned to European co-productions in Latin America. Indeed, her film is not conceived as a cultural or sociological object that would try to explain something of the Costa Rican society. The film is conceived as a true object of cinema, which is anchored in a local reality without it being exoticized or explanatory. To this end, the work on the photography is remarkable, in a sincere desire to show the city of San Jose in the image of its characters, both flawed and endearing.
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