Clara Sola

The premise of the movie is very good. However, it fails to connect with the viewer. On several occasions it feels like the film is made for someone else, it fails to penetrate the viewer's consciousness. The photography is wonderful, the handling of the camera is excellent. The love of nature is shown in an extraordinary way. Finally, the music is horrible, very uncomfortable.

One could spend lifetimes learning to see the world the way Clara does. Her intuition for the universe's hidden matrix allows her to vibrate along with its sound. She's attuned to the earth and the soil and is Mother to all the animals who share it. Every creature has a "secret name" that Clara can detect through nature's reverberations. Her distinct gaze suggests a far more piquant view of the world that offsets the rest of the film's conventionality. Her eyes are sunken and fervent; they seem to expose new beauty and meaning all the time. The film excels when we, too, are made to see through them.

This is the rather sad story of a middle-aged woman (Clara, Wendy Chinchilla Araya) living with her elderly mother in a rural Costa Rican village, as well as her dead sister's teenaged daughter. Clara is happy communing with nature and the family's horse and understands things through her quiet observations that others don't, and yet, she's mentally challenged, and seriously repressed. Her mother's idea of showing love and protecting her is to deny her a surgery the doctors recommend ("God gave her to me like this"), prop her up as one touched by the Virgin Mary to serve as a faith healer of sorts to the locals, and to put chili pepper on her fingers when she catches her masturbating. It's quite maddening.

We see Clara take steps to control over her identity and sexuality, but it's an uphill battle in this environment. Daniel Castañeda Rincón turns in a strong performance as he niece's boyfriend, who she becomes attracted to, but to director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén's credit, she never settles for easy moments of sexual awakening when lesser films would have done so. Araya channels a purity of soul in the lead character, while at the same time, somehow never idealizing her. It's not clear what she believes about all the Virgin Mary stuff, but she has an extraordinary connection to nature, with a spirituality that feels far more enlightened.

This is a solid effort all around, and the only reason for not rating it higher was how difficult it was to watch what amounted to a claustrophobic form of abuse. Certainly worth seeing though.

Clara Sola is quite a tour de force.

It is the first feminist movie I have watched in which the men (Santiago and Fran) are actually not toxic and mean at all. The social and religious norms are mostly enforced by the main female characters.

The film combines a political and sociological perspective with the esoteric beauty of magical realism. The spectator oscillates between contemplation, empathy and anger throughout the plot.

Clara Sola reminded me a little bit of Ixcanul and El Abrazo de la Serpiente. The main actress gives an unforgettable performance.

Entre croyances, religion, mysticisme, amour de la nature et éveil de la sexualité , un film complexe et séduisant. Vu aux Images hispano-américaines d'Annecy.