Version of this review “Clara Solo”First ran at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
A quiet character study which, somewhere along the way, transforms into a Costa Rican-style version. “Carrie,” “Clara Sola”Mixing religion, mysticism, and sexuality creates a unique experience that is both disconcerting, odd, and rewarding. It starts out beautifully restrained and ends up somewhere else entirely, but it’s all the more interesting for its split personality.
“Clara Solo” is the first feature from Costa Rican-Swedish director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén, and also the feature debut of film’s star, Wendy Chinchilla. She’s a Costa Rican dancer with no experience in film but a powerful presence that speaks volumes through stillness.
Chinchilla plays Clara a 40-year old woman suffering from a spinal condition. She spends her days communing with Yuca, her horse, and obeying her mother’s orders. Clara, a healer who saw the Virgin Mary and has cured her cancer, is what she does. She trots Clara out for healing rituals in their small home, but otherwise keeps her daughter under her thumb, going so far as to refuse a local doctor’s advice that Clara get an operation to fix her spine.
“God gave her to me like this,”According to her mother, “She stays like this.”
Clara, for her part, submits to the restrictions that have been placed on her; she’s too meek to challenge her mother, or too beaten down to resist anymore. Clara has no agency in her life. This is a simple fact, but it’s not hard to see.
Clara rebels unconsciously. She may also be showing small signs that she is having a sexual awakening. While she is watching TV, Clara touches her body in a non-conscious manner. Her mother then grabs Clara, rubs her hands in hot chiles, and Clara remains passive and still.
The movie starts to feel that stillness and it just sits there, quietly observing, without any music or sound for long periods. When The music does come in, it’s usually spare: plucked strings and little else. The look and feel of the film is grounded in earth and mud and bugs and rain, but there’s also a gentle mysticism at work that’s familiar to lovers of South and Central American cinema.
Clara’s mother demands that her daughter never change, that she live in plainness and in pain and care only about healing others, or at least convincing others that she can heal them. But slowly, we see Clara’s rebellion begin to manifest: At first she simply declares that she wants a blue dress, a prospect that shocks her mother – but it’s clear that what she really wants is to be touched, to embrace the physical in a way she’s never before done.
As Clara’s passion begins to awaken, so does “Clara Sola.” When she sees her young niece having sex with her boyfriend, she masturbates in the woods and is immediately surrounded by fireflies. At a certain point, it does seem that she has powers – but do those powers come from the religious shrine in the living room, or from emerging sexuality?
You won’t necessarily find the answer in Álvarez Mesén’s film, but you will find a movie that itself becomes more aggressive along with its heroine. And when things comes to a head at her niece’s 15th birthday party, it’s hard not to think of the climactic prom scene in Brian DePalma’s “Carrie” – not in the sense of buckets of blood or anything like that, but in the way both films suggest that repressing female desires via religion or anything else can end very, very badly.
The sequence that follows, as well as the one that ends the movie is not nearly what you might have expected during the first few minutes. “Clara Sola.” Álvarez Mesén may be a first-time feature director, but she has enough control to take an austere, unsettling drama with a touch of magical realism and turn it into a wild ride, all without losing its complicated heart.
“Clara Sola”Friday, April 5, 2012 in U.S. theatres