Simple photo of a Peruvian family – The Hollywood Reporter

Renas

Courtesy of Diego Romero/Sundance Institute

Claudia Reineke built-in feature Renas He handles intimate moments with simple charm.

The film, which premiered in World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance, is set in Lima during the turbulent summer of 1992 and chronicles an uneasy reunion between a father and his two daughters. It’s a quiet study of parental redemption, much like in summer, one of the festival’s other offerings this year. Here, as in Alessandra Lacorazza’s debut, the complexities of a seemingly simple relationship reveal themselves over the course of lazy summer days. Renicki (Love me tender, El Nido) is a poignant personal study of a family trying to establish itself against the backdrop of a fragile political scene.

A TV news report excerpted from the 1990s serves as an introduction, detailing a country in crisis. Peru’s Minister of Economy announced that in the next 24 hours, the price of milk will jump from 120,000 entí to 330,000 entí, and the cost of sugar, which now stands at 150,000 entí, will double. In the midst of this stifling economy, Carlos (Gonzalo Molina) drives his taxi around the city.

When we meet the father of Lucia (April Gurinovic) and Aurora (Luana Vega) he is in the middle of a conversation about his dormant acting career with an uninterested passenger. The shepherd asks Carlos with waning curiosity if he works in television or film. Carlos says he is a stage actor and then proceeds to list some movie roles. It is not clear that this story – along with many others – is not traced until later. Renas It revolves around how Carlos is reunited with his daughters as the siblings prepare to leave Lima with their mother Elena (Ximena Lindo). But it is also about the stories a father tells himself and his children to build a different self-image.

Carlos, whom Aurora and Lucia know, are nice, unreliable girls. At the beginning Renas, Carlos arrived late to Aurora’s eldest 18th birthday party. He enters with a mouth full of lies – excuses for his tardiness that are like apologies for his general absence. When the younger Lucia asked him where he was, Carlos said without missing a beat, that he was in the jungle fighting crocodiles. The girls couldn’t help but muster looks of disbelief. Later in the concert, when Carlos regales the audience with a harrowing story about his near death and a car bomb explosion, the audience is ready to respond in kind.

As Carlos spends more time with his girls, the illusion of who he wants to be is replaced by the reality of who he is. Reineke creates the image of a man making an effort. One of the most powerful and magical moments Renas It revolves around two beach trips that Carlos unofficially organizes at the request of Lucia and Aurora. In these moments, he takes on the caring role he once abandoned. Shore excursions are imbued with hope and possibility. They have a dreamy quality with ethereal choral music playing over scenes of Carlos teaching Lucia how to ride a wave or bartering with roadside hawkers for the girls’ lunch or new swimsuits.

Molina also plays Carlos, a character who bets on his casual charm to mask his non-conformist nature and tendency to dishonesty. But as the character renews his commitment to his daughters, we can see him trying to fight this reaction and act more authentically. Molina teases out this shift, which helps obscure lingering questions about Carlos’s job, his place in the Peruvian political spectrum, and the history between him and Elena.

Outside the bubble that Carlos and Elena have created for their daughters, Lima becomes nervous. The city no longer feels safe, and Reineke offers a visceral depiction of political reality through simple scenes of everyday life – conversations about strict curfews, which create fear; scarcity of basic goods; The challenge Elena faces when exchanging Ents for US dollars is one of the few examples.

Elena, played with understated intensity by Lindo, doesn’t want to raise her children in this environment. She invites Carlos back into their lives partly because she wants him to sign their daughters’ travel papers. While Carlos forms new bonds with Lucia and Aurora and subtly tries to sabotage the plan, we see Elena wandering around Lima preparing for their upcoming trip.

in RenasReynicke offers a quietly sad portrait of an unexpected effort to make a family feel whole. Realizing that he may never see his daughters again, Carlos re-energizes his commitment to them with quality time and tokens of affection. Even the way he refers to them — his preferred term of endearment is “reinas” — changes, feeling more weighty and sincere.

Reynicke also devotes screen time to portraying Lucia and Aurora’s relationship. Lucia still insists on going wherever her mother goes, but Aurora has her own priorities in Lima. Scenes of the sisters negotiating their impending departure are steeped in precise devastation. At the end of the RenasWe begin to see that Carlos is not the only one who needs to believe in a different reality.