Summer 1993 (Estiu 1993)

seen on 12 August 2018

Carla Simon directs Laia Artigas as Frida, Paula Roblas as her cousin Anna, and David Verdaguer and Bruna Cusi as Anna's parents Esteve and Marge in a film about six-year-old Frida's adjustment to living in the country near Girona after her mother has died of AIDS in Barcelona. Frida's grandparents and aunts, living in Barcelona, can no longer care for her and so she goes with her mother's brother to live with him, his wife and little daughter.

Self-possessed, and cautiously exploring the new boundaries of her life and the limits to which she may try the patience of the adults now in charge of her, Frida inevitably creates tensions and causes problems, even as she tries to make sense of what has happened to her. The film presents the events of the summer before she starts school almost entirely from her point of view, the camera often literally just behind her as she surveys the house, the garden, the nearby forest, or else focussing closely on her expressive face. We see her relatives through her eyes, though we no doubt understand more from their expressions and hesitations than a young child could.

Problems of fitting in with the village children are exemplified by a scene in which she grazes her knee and the mother of another child is panicked by the possibility that her blood may be contaminated. This, and her doctor's appointment for blood tests, alert us to the shadow of AIDS, though the explanation she is given of her mother's death when she finally asks Marge about it is phrased in carefully imprecise terms such as a child might cope with.

Within the family, tensions arise as the two girls learn to get along through play, exchange of knowledge, and subtle exercises of power on Frida's part, some of which prove almost disastrous, but all of which arise from her quite plausible sense of insecurity. There are marvellously natural scenes between the two girls, whose performances make the film exceptionally good at revealing the world of childhood without the usual patina of adult hindsight and over-determination.

My sister, brother-in-law and I sat amazed in the cinema after the credits rolled, sharing our admiration for the truthfulness of particular scenes, and the unobtrusive ways in which the director has elicited such extraordinary performances from the two little girls, and the sympathetic support of the adult characters in creating the story. Detail after detail rang true. We were equally astonished  to hear from an usher that some others in the audience had been overheard saying that the film was boring. It is not!