Manager: Celia Rico
Artists: María Vázquez, Adriana Ozores, Aimar Vega
Year: 2024
Premiere: 3/8/24
★★★★
Two distinct angles define Celia Rico’s second feature, echoing the approach that first marked her breakout film. On one level, the work revisits the intimate, sometimes stifling, sometimes deeply moving bond between a mother and her daughter, a dynamic already explored in the earlier project with the mother-daughter pair, Lola Dueñas and Anna Castillo. On the other, it channels a different energy: a summer confinement that brings Adriana Ozores and María Vázquez into a new, emotionally charged orbit. The tension between proximity and distance remains central, but the tonal register shifts, inviting viewers to consider how time, memory, and circumstance reshape a family’s everyday intimacy.
The first path to understanding rests on Rico’s craft: she tests a familiar premise with precise, almost surgical repetition, not as a rote repetition but as a deliberate risk. She revisits the parental corridor she laid out before, yet with sharper consequences and a more nuanced gaze. The repeated motif becomes a tool for measuring character resilience, a way to watch how each line of dialogue and each silent pause reveals a hidden reserve of strength, vulnerability, or resistance. What could feel repetitive instead becomes a study in how small, almost invisible shifts—an look, a breath, a choice—can alter a relationship’s entire geometry.
Looking at the film as a diptych or a peer variation on the same foundational theme offers another layer of meaning. Rico appears to draw on different characters and circumstances, filling in what the earlier film left open. She pushes the core questions in new directions, showing that the mother-daughter bond can carry multiple truths at once. The juxtaposition of two portraits—one with a broader social texture, the other more interior and intimate—highlights how variation across stories can illuminate shared concerns. In doing so, the director invites audiences to compare the emotional landscapes, tracing how each story negotiates care, autonomy, and the pull of obligation.
This fresh vision borrows the air of a name sometimes associated with a different era, even echoing Jean Eustache’s cadence from My Little Loves, yet Rico makes the reference feel contemporary rather than nostalgic. The film concerns itself with generational exchange and the friction that arises when different generations attempt to understand one another. It leans into the complexity of family life without falling into melodrama, choosing instead a steady, enveloping tone that respects the intelligence of its characters. As the narrative unfolds, the sense of ease grows, and a certain reluctance to overcontrol becomes a revealing thread. Rico’s storytelling remains generous to her women characters, granting them complexity, agency, and room to breathe within the family circle. The result is a film that feels both candid and expansive, capable of honoring ordinary moments while recognizing their larger emotional stakes.
The result is a meditation on connection that does not shy away from discomfort. It acknowledges that closeness can be both a refuge and a pressure point, a paradox that many families know all too well. By centering women and their views, the film builds a world in which daily rituals—shared meals, quiet conversations, and the rhythm of daily life—become the arena for real, lived experience. The characters are allowed to exist in their own right, with flaws that are human rather than dramatic, and triumphs that arrive in quiet, earned ways. In the end, the film offers a tempered, insightful portrait of kinship that lingers in the memory, inviting viewers to reflect on the ways love, memory, and time shape every family’s journey.
Overall, the piece stands as a thoughtful extension of Rico’s cinematic language. It respects the emotional logic of its predecessor while expanding the tonal palette and narrative scope. The result is a mature, resonant work that speaks with honesty about the difficulty and beauty of mother-daughter relationships, and about how families, under the pressure of life, keep choosing to stay close—even when distance feels most appealing, or when the world seems to demand otherwise.