By Jim Gilles
At the Landmark Westwood this weekend is a screening of Nathalie Álvarez Mésen’s Clara Sola, a breathtaking feature debut by the Costa Rican-Swedish writer/director. In a remote village in Costa Rica, Clara, a withdrawn 40-year-old woman, experiences a sexual and mystical awakening as she begins a journey to free herself from the repressive religious and social conventions which have dominated her life. The uniformly excellent cast of first-time actors is headed by dancer Wendy Chinchilla Araya as Clara, a 40-year-old woman who is believed to be the healer of her remote village. Her mother Fresia (Flor María Vargas Chavez) refuses a doctor’s urgent request to have her daughter’s spine straightened, insisting that her body should remain as God intended it, prompting Clara’s 14-year-old niece, María (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza), to pointedly ask, “Then should I have kept any teeth crooked?”
Clara Sola was written by the director together with Colombian screenwriter Maria Camila Arias. Their script investigates toxic matriarchal rituals and paints a quietly devastating picture of the people trapped in society. Things come to a head when it’s time to celebrate María’s 15th birthday with all the feminine traditions that come with it, including dances and a special dress. This quinceañera will be the occasion where the world as they know it will unravel in some ways.
In a cast largely comprised of amateurs, Wendy Chinchilla as Clara has to carry the film, and she delivers on all fronts. She is a trained dancer, but those abilities don’t aid her much in this part. She is an amazing presence with an almost feline quality, which is most obviously expressed in the latter part of the film. It’s a role that could easily fall into cliché, but she handles the challenge perfectly. Others are fine in their roles as well.
Clara lives with her religious mother, Fresia (Flor María Vargas Chaves), and her teenage niece, María (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza), whose coming-of-age sparks Clara’s own awakening. But the figure she most identifies with is Yuca, the family’s unicorn-white mare. They’re both money-earning attractions: Yuca is rented out to local guides working in Costa Rica’s thriving tourist industry. Clara is offered up to worshippers as a healer who has a direct line to the Blessed Virgin.
For these yearning-fueled gatherings with the devout and the distressed, Clara is bathed, shampooed and dressed up, like a child. Beneath her clothes, she’s trussed in a binding corset for her curvature of the spine – a condition that could be corrected with surgery, all costs covered by insurance. But Fresia refuses. She has no interest in making Clara like everyone else. “God gave her to me like this,” she tells the doctor. “She stays like this.”
The freedom that is allowed to the fourteen-year-old Maria to flirt and do whatever she wants to do contradicts Clara’s life, a person who has been pent up and restricted for all of her 40 years on this planet. She is stifled intellectually and sexually. Fresia uses chilies on Clara’s fingertips to stop Clara from touching herself. In the film, director Mesén focuses on the brutal relationship we have with religion and spirituality.
With the arrival of Santiago (Daniel Castañeda Rincón), a new employee of a small tour company, the energy within the family of women shifts. Both María and Clara are drawn to the kind young man, but it takes the inexperienced Clara a while to recognize her feelings. Santiago’s initial encounter with a scowling Clara, when she tries to keep him from taking Yuca for a stint with tourists (“She doesn’t want to go!”), spurs him to ask María, “Is your aunt always that angry?” Her response, “If she was really angry, we’d know about it,” proves prescient.
Santiago is imbued with riveting naturalistic sincerity by Castañeda Rincón, and the way he becomes the center of a psychosexual triangle is thoroughly convincing. His romantic involvement with María is conventional; his friendship with Clara is, in many ways, far more intimate. Intrigued by her oddness, he recognizes a stunted life aching to unfurl. In a scene between them that could be viewed as an antithetical corollary to the menstrual-blood sequence in Carrie, Santiago’s sympathy and tact are extraordinary.
The mother Fresia sees Clara as the Virgin Mary, a person who must not be touched from the outside world, needs to be clean and as pure as possible, with no alterations made by man. We see this from the hospital visit to even how Clara is dressed. Given no options and to look at how her mother and others feel, we see the anger and frustration build up within her. Yet, the more she sees outside of her mother’s world, the more she wants to try and enjoy it, even wearing a nice dress at Maria’s party. You can’t help but feel for Clara and hope she can break away, like a more poetic Carrie, Clara Sola.
Clara finds solace in nature, and feels a close bond to the family’s beloved white horse, Yuca. She seems most content when outside, in the woods or near the river, away from others, with only herself and her thoughts. Lying on the grass, with her ear to the ground, she listens for sounds of movement: Earthquake tremors are both natural occurrences and portents of the mystical.
There’s the ghost of the dominant patriarchy in this household, even though we see no men in the family: Clara has been worn down by both her mother and niece. Meanwhile, the preparations for María’s upcoming quinceañera are getting all of the household’s attention, which Clara resents. When Fresia announces that she might sell Yuca to pay for the celebration, that adds further fuel to her resentment.
Meanwhile, Clara’s strong, unexplained connection to Santiago grows, despite the fact that he is much younger and Mariá’s secret boyfriend. He is gentle with Yuca, and speaks to Clara as an equal and not simply as a child or someone “different,” as others do. Their relationship is, at first, tentative – after all, her confused feelings are the kind she’s most likely been repressing for years – but it reaches a climax at Mariá’s party, which leads to an ambiguous ending that includes an earthquake and a fire – all part of Clara’s cherished natural world.
Álvarez Mesén exhibits remarkable control throughout, bookending the film with shots of Clara and Yuca that encompass the immense emotional and physical ground Clara has traveled. Visually, cinematographer Sophie Winqvist Loggins’s intimate handheld camerawork – of the interiors and outside in nature – beautifully conveys the sense of Clara trying to manage the difficult balancing act of living in two worlds, one that has never been kind to her and the other she longs to remain. Similarly, Álvarez Mesén uses Ruben De Gheselle’s quivery violin score smartly and sparingly as it underlines Clara’s deeper relationship with the luminous natural world.
Álvarez Mesén, who has half a dozen shorts to her credit and contributed to two LGBTQ anthology films, Upon Her Lips: Heartbeats and The Swedish Boys, steps into feature filmmaking with assurance. Álvarez Mesén’s film is a discreet, reflective piece of realism – a study of a character who exists filled with pent-up urges, a growing sense of rebelliousness against her family and the faith of which she isn’t certain, and all of the potential that no one wants her to realize.
