MOVIE INFO:
Eva is a strong-willed, restless 16-year-old girl who lives with her mother, her younger sister and their cat, but desperately wants to move in with her estranged father. Clinging onto him as he goes through a second adolescence, she balances between the tenderness and sensitivity of teenage life and the ruthlessness of the adult world. Bathed in a richly textured imagery and soaked in raw sensitivity, I HAVE ELECTRIC DREAMS captures the thin line between love and hate, in a world where aggression and rage intertwined with the vertigo of female sexual awakening.
REVIEW:
I will away watch a well reviewed coming of age drama from another country. I know I’m going to get something well thought out and that will deliver the movie above genre conventions.
Valentina Maurel’s Costa Rican drama I Have Electric Dreams takes the girl side of coming to awareness and twists it with lyricism, beauty and violence. Sixteen-year-old Eva (Daniela Marin Navarro) struggles with her parents divorce. She and her sister live with their well-to-do Mother, Anca (Vivian Rodriguez) whom Eva resents, while she idealizes her father, Martin (Renaldo Amien Gutierrez), a failed poet with anger issues. She wants to live with him, despite the mother’s warning “The obsession you have with your dad, and all the men that come your way, is something that’ll pass, mark my words!”
To capture the chaos Eva feels inside and around her, Maurel employs a handheld camera . Its effective in the way it layers everything in a combustible naturalism. The cinematographer, Wong Diaz’s lens prowls intimately, capturing the chaotic lives of the characters, how they live in a capriciousness that’s hard to pin down- a messy humanity that is empathetic yet cleared eye. It shows the universal family love that tangles and binds them, and us, kin to kin, in spite of ourselves, and themselves.
The title comes from a few lines of Martin’s poems. “I have electric dreams… A pack of wild animals / Scream their love for each other / Sometimes with blows.” They explain the feline tenor the film has- most of it is presented from Eva’s disjointed point of view. It’s precocious, rough edged, a nascent creative spirit blossoming into her sexuality. Appropriately, that awakening happens at Dreams midpoint, where she loses her virginity, to her Dad’s opportunistic roommate, Dove (Jose Pablo Segreda Johanning), a man decades her senior.
Maurel doesn’t really break new ground formally or content wise. Her strength is developing characters that feel authentic. Eva and Martin, the father and daughter, the most crucial one, is also the one that feels the most true. The near-wordless scene in which Martin realises that Eva has “lost” her virginity to his chum is almost unbearable in its sheer emotional intensity. That attention to emotional character details makes I Have Electric Dreams work, makes it an authentic offering of the new Mid Latin American cinema.
I Have Electric Dreams gets a 3.5/5 or a B+. It’s streaming on Mubi.
CREDITS:
Tengo sueños eléctricos
Directed by
Valentina Maurel
Written by
Valentina Maurel
Produced by
- Benoit Roland
- Grégoire Debailly
Starring
- Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez
- Daniela Marín Navarro
- Vivian Rodriguez
- Adriana Castro García
- Jose Pablo Segreda Johanning
Cinematography
Nicolás Wong Díaz
Edited by
Bertrand Conard
Production
companies
- Wrong Men
- Geko Films
Distributed by
Cinéart
Release date
- 8 August 2022(Locarno)
Running time
101 minutes
Countries
- Costa Rica
- Belgium
- France
Language
Spanish
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