Inverness Film Festival: Clara Sola (15)
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5 stars
Verdant forest, jewel-like beetles, drifting fireflies and the captured sound of furry caterpillars stepping over moss-covered rocks – director Nathalie Alvarez Mesen in her first feature film has created a sumptuous natural world for her mysterious heroine.
The story of Clara is a bewitching glimpse into a tightly-controlled life just as religion and exploitation are swept away by more powerful forces inside her breaking free and rocking the wider world.
In a Costa Rican village, a middle-aged woman Clara (Wendy Chincilla Araya) – with a curved spine, childlike understanding and possible healing abilities – is looked-after by her religious and controlling mother Fresia (Flor Maria Vargas Chavez) who touts her daughter’s supposed gift for cash.
The director shows Clara delighting in the world around her. Being driven in a car, her hands flutter and turn in the air outside the window. In another scene, we see Clara and caring niece Maria (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza) waking early, in the frame just their hands stretched up twisting gently side by side.
When the doctor tells Clara’s mother that a free operation could solve Clara’s painful spinal issues, the mother won’t entertain it: “God gave her to me like this. She stays like this.”
Religious feelings of destiny or a risk to the family meal ticket?
But change is coming. Clara’s niece Maria is turning 15 when the culture demands that a ‘quinceanera’ – big coming-of-age party – is held. When male farmworker Santiago (Daniel Castaneda Rincon) comes to work on tourist tours with Clara’s beautiful white horse Yuca, Maria falls for him and they start a relationship, but Clara has noticed him too.
Clara’s focus is Yuca, their closeness a conversation we almost hear, and her love of beetles is reflected in the time she spends with them, when not being regularly dressed up in her mother’s choice of demure clothes to be the focus of hymns and healing sessions.
When Clara tells Santiago that all the family has to work, he asks what she does and she replies: “Mama says I work for God.”
As her desire Santiago grows, igniting a lust in Clara that her mother shuts down mercilessly, the healer is unsettled to discover secret plans for her beloved mare.
A connection grows between Santiago and Clara – he is fascinated by her unusual take on life and tries to help her feel more free – such as encouraging her to fully immerse herself in a forest pool. It’s one of many moments when nature and magic realism blur boundaries in this film, including Clara awakening nestled under a giant tree and a lyrical scene with Ofir, her beetle.
But as Clara’s feelings start to become overwhelming, the earth literally moves and an underwater transformation leaves you wondering – a continuity slip or magic?
Wendy Chincilla Araya captures the awkwardness of this half-lived life, and the blossoming of it as Clara starts to fully channel her special powers.
QUOTE:
Clara: I think she lives by the river now.
Santiago: Do you know where the river ends?
Clara: The river never ends …
Clara Sola is released in the UK on November 18.
