Estiu 1993

Carla Simón (2017)

Following the death of her parents, six-year-old Frida (Laia Artigas) is sent to live with her uncle Esteve (David Verdaguer), his wife Marga (Bruna Cusí) and their infant daughter Anna (Paula Robles) in the Catalonian countryside.  In a few weeks’ time, Frida will start school there.  Things happen in Summer 1993 but the writer-director Carla Simón describes a situation – and the behaviour of a single individual within that situation – as much as she tells a story.  It takes a little time to adjust to this but Simón’s film (in Catalan) builds, engages and impresses – all the more in retrospect.

Both Frida’s parents have died of AIDS, her father first.  While her mother is dying, the child is cared for by her maternal grandparents (Isabel Rocatti and Fermí Reixach) in their Barcelona apartment.  After Frida moves, the grandparents pay more than one visit to their son Esteve’s home and the grandmother especially is anxious for Frida to spend more time with them back in Barcelona.  Esteve and Marga resist, determined to do all they can to help Frida get used to her new surroundings.  She calls Marga and Esteve mummy and daddy but she knows they’re not:  the poignancy of the child’s unhappiness and isolation is increased by the adults trying their best while being aware that they can’t make everything fine – and by Frida’s natural liveliness, her frequent smiles and laughter.  Although her presence in the household creates friction, particularly with Marga, her new parents understand the importance of having difficult conversations out of earshot of Frida, even if they don’t always succeed.   The visually paradisal setting also makes things better and worse for her.  As photographed by Santiago Racaj, the landscape of woodland and water has a lush, new-minted quality.  It invites enchanted exploration at the same time as it heightens Frida’s strangerhood.

In what is her first feature, Carla Simón shows a sure touch.  She illustrates very well a fine line between the unremarkable and the extraordinary aspects of Frida’s circumstances.  She cuts her knee while playing:  the mother of another child, knowing how Frida’s parents died, drags her daughter away in panic.   Anna, after having her own pretend conversation on the telephone, hands it to Frida and asks if she wants to call her mother.  The summer heat is palpable, in the silence as well as the chirping crickets, and Simón suggests its various emotional effects, sometimes making Frida more restlessly bored, sometimes acting as a kind of anaesthetic.  The exasperated Marga complains to Esteve that ‘the child has no morals’, a phrase that sticks in your mind.  Frida more than once causes trouble, knowing that she doesn’t belong in the way that Anna belongs.  At one point, when they go to play in woodland near the family home, Frida abandons Anna, supposedly as part of their game.  Marga comes out to check on the girls and is soon searching anxiously for Anna.  The next that we see of the younger child, her lower arm is in plaster.  Later, in a public bathing area, Frida, while Esteve’s back is turned, lets the eagerly curious Anna come into the water until she slips beneath it.  Esteve hears the splash, jumps in and rescues Anna, shouting angrily at Frida, ‘Are you trying to kill her or something?’  It’s a strong moment:  partly because Esteve is, for the most part, calm and quiet (sometimes determinedly so); partly because the truthful answer to his question, to which the shocked Frida doesn’t reply, may not be an unequivocal no.

There are no flashbacks – no picture, in other words, of Frida’s life with her mother (one assumes she’s too young to remember her father).  The lack of any comparison of Frida’s past and present might seem to limit the film.  In fact, it proves an effective way of reflecting the painful inaccessibility of her former world.  The accidents involving Anna depend on inattention that’s uncharacteristic of Marga and Esteve.  Otherwise, nothing in the film rings at all false and the closing stages are extraordinarily well put together.  After having to be dragged from her grandparents’ car as they prepare to leave, Frida decides to return to Barcelona under her own steam.  She sets out late one night, while Marga and Esteve are asleep, but not before Anna has woken up and asked what she’s doing.  The younger child obviously lets her parents know and Frida doesn’t get far.  As the family returns home, she says matter of factly, ‘It’s too dark:  I’ll go tomorrow’.  She doesn’t, though, and this crisis is something of a turning point.  Simón cuts to a local carnival, in which Frida has a key role in the parade:  she looks up euphorically at Esteve, Marga and Anna, watching in the stands.  The final scene takes place on the eve of Frida’s starting her new school.   She and Anna giggle and bounce on their bed as hard as they can; Esteve joins in the fooling around; Marga looks on, smiling.  Frida’s laughter suddenly turns to sobs.  The parents ask what’s wrong and if she’s hurt herself.  She shakes her head and insists she’s fine, knowing that she is and she isn’t.  Her bursting into tears is mixture of persisting grief and relief at having become part of the family to the extent that she now has.  This makes for a very moving ending.

The film is strongly autobiographical and Carla Simón dedicates it to her mother (whether her birth mother or her adoptive mother, I don’t know).  The signs of autobiography are present throughout – in the lack of contrived incident, the focus on a single character’s moods and perspective, the precise date of the title.  (There’s very little in the film that’s comparably time-specific:  the attitudes towards AIDS place the story in the past but not in a particular year.  The title also suggests that Simón is still only in her very early thirties.)  Simón has not assumed, as writer-directors often seem to assume, that putting your personal history on the screen is a necessary guarantee of authenticity, a proof that all is true.  Summer 1993 is refreshing in that recreating her own experience hasn’t at all stifled the film-maker’s imagination.  What she gets from the two young children, especially Laia Artigas, is magically natural and expressive:  I can’t begin to think how Simón achieved this.  This film probably had to be made by a woman:  it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that some of the bathtime and bedtime sequences, which are proof of how much trust Simón built in her cast, would have been less kindly reviewed if the gaze behind the camera had been a male one.  All the adults are good but David Verdaguer’s subtle naturalistic performance is outstanding.  As well as being great with the children, Verdaguer beautifully conveys the stresses and sadness that Esteve is trying to contain.

26 July 2018