He debut in the direction of Valentina Maurelalso a screenwriter, is an uncomfortable film, as tender as it is surly, often dazzling, of an unusual force in a work of exordium and inclined to the honesty of the titles that come to us from South America; of Costa Rica in this case.
Maurel does very well with a limited budget, few characters and few locations, telling a story that seems small but peppered with nuances, enhanced by fragile and plausible characters, whom the director never judges. In addition, the excellent photographic work of Nicolas Wong endows ‘I have electric dreams‘ of a rough and immediate texturedirectly related to violence and the spontaneity in which emotions and impulses flow in it, not always for the best.
The escape from the cliché forward
Under the guise of a coming of age epidermal and immersive, the film, awarded with the Horizontes award at the last festival in San Sebastián, tells the story of Eva, a teenager fascinated by the figure of her father, a misshapen and bohemian man, as well as his group of friends and the life they represent.
To delve into this fascination, and turn it into a universal reflection free of easy moralizing, the delicate and sensory work of the two leading actors is essential: Daniela Marín Navarro and Reinaldo Amien Gutiérrez, both awarded at the Locarno festival.
The movie flirts with political incorrectness and sows the story with nuances and chiaroscuro not always common in this type of production, as it shows the father as an aggressive and tender man, and especially when it reflects the young protagonist’s sexual relationship with one of his friends, giving rise to some of the most daring moments , and at the same time criticized, of the whole.
Never complacent, complex and firmly mature in the ability not to show exits or stick conclusions, the film flees from the cliché by offering a harsh portrait of the middle class and always showing a hidden violence that constantly contrasts with the magnetic poetry of its images and its uprooted protagonists.
The portrait constantly grows based on delving into taboos and contradictions, sowing doubts and enigmas in a stony narrative but managed with an iron hand. Her many discoveries and her disheveled naturalism bring her closer to recent films such as the Chilean ‘Tarde para morir joven’ (2018) by Dominga Sotomayor or the Colombian ‘La jauría’ (2022) by Andrés Ramírez Pulido, all governed by the magisterium of the incontestable Lucrecia Martel, a beacon for so many contemporary filmmakers.
‘I have electric dreams’: love toxicity
shaken by that very electricity that contaminates and dirty each frame, Maurel’s film overflows its latitudes and approaches other family portraits describing relationships based on tension and addiction to attachment.
French, like ‘The breath to the heart’ (1971); Italian, like ‘La luna’ (1979); North American, such as ‘The diary of a teenage girl’ (2015); or Spanish, such as ‘The daughter of a thief’ (2019). And, in the meantime, it demystifies and calls into question the false world of salon poetry that a few decades ago raised films as questionable as the saga ‘El lado oscuro del corazón’ (1992/2001) by Argentine Eliseo Subiela.