Las hijas de Abril (2017)

Directed by: Michel Franco | 103 minutes | drama | Actors: Emma Suarez, Ana Valeria Becerril, Enrique Arrizon, Joanna Larequi, Hernán Mendoza, Ivan Cortes, Mario Escalante

When seventeen-year-old Valeria is pregnant, her hitherto absent mother suddenly appears on the doorstep. To assist her daughter, as she herself says, but Valeria has her reservations. Rightly so. The Mexican director Michel Franco (‘Después de Lucia’) tells a story full of unlikely events in a contemplative way, without judging his remarkable characters. The viewer is instructed to go along with this. Just like its predecessor ‘Después de Lucia’, ‘Las hijas de Abril’ was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival.

We hear sounds of sexual acts coming from an adjacent room. The plump Clara listens resignedly as she prepares her breakfast. Then the very young and thin Valeria walks out of the room, stark naked. At first we only see her arms, but when she emerges from behind the kitchen bar, her bulging, pregnant belly appears pontifically. The awkward tone of the film is set.

Valeria and Clara are sisters and live together in a beautiful house by the sea in the Mexican resort of Puerto Vallarta. Their parents do not live with them, but there is some telephone contact, albeit not wholeheartedly. Valeria prefers not to share her pregnancy with the parents, especially not with her mother, Abril. When Clara, born of part concern and part resentment, nevertheless informs their mother about the pregnancy, she decides to drop by. Supposedly to help, but Valeria has her doubts, and passes them on to the viewer. For does Abril really help her daughters selflessly and unconditionally? Or is there something else going on? Her controlling behavior and meddling are already hard to accept, but it will get a lot worse than that.

Spanish actress Emma Suárez, known for early films by Julio Medem and the beautiful ‘Julieta’ by Pedro Almodóvar, can carry the unlikely character of Abril: a still attractive middle-aged woman who is clearly in the middle of her midlife crisis and looking for something that can give her life new meaning. The young actors have a bit more trouble giving the characters more than one dimension. Especially Ana Valeria Becerril and Enrique Arrizon can not always fully convince Valeria and Mateo as parents that are too young.

Director Franco certainly does not have a rosy picture of family life, or indeed of any kind of human interaction. Although his Mexico looks peaceful in the movies, the sun always shines and the middle class he targets are well-off, everything is brewing and bubbling under the surface. The tension is constantly palpable. It is not the government, the criminals or authorities that bring misery, but the citizens themselves. Perhaps a painful exposure of his view of society. Subcutaneous tensions, insults, discomfort. The men are passive, stupid and sex-hungry and the women false, gloomy and jealous.

The events keep brewing in the first part of ‘Las hijas de Abril’, but tumble over each other in the last part. You can feel what is about to happen, but Franco goes a step further than any expectation. The unfortunate thing is that as a viewer you are already so far removed from the distant and inscrutable characters that it becomes a challenge to go along in the sinister universe of ‘Las hijas de Abril’. The absence of a soundtrack or close-ups to get closer to the characters amplify the distance. If you manage to be carried away by Franco, the film will make a lasting impression.