Clara Sola (2021)
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Clara Sola Movie Review
Clara Sola is a 2021 Costa Rican drama film directed by Nathalie Alvarez Mesen and starring Wendy Chinchilla Araya. It is an overly strange movie that was difficult to enjoy.
In a remote village in Costa Rica, Clara, a 36-year-old woman, takes off on a journey to break free from social and religious conventions and become the master of her sexuality and newfound powers. This is a very feminist picture that received high praise from critics and a lot of festival attention, but to me it felt overrated and frustrating.
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The best reason to see this film is easily for the central performance from Wendy Chinchilla Araya. She delivered a powerhouse performance and both her looks, manner of speech and subtle emotiveness felt quite authentic. The character of Clara is very well developed, believable and it is rare to see a protagonist in a film that is so broken. Her learning to fight for herself and her sexuality was the emotional and inspirational crux of the story.
But the main issue here was its overly strange nature. The almost fairy tale-like atmosphere worked to a degree, but the movie suffered severely from a languid pace, a lack of more meaningful dialogue and many scenes that ranged from off-putting to simply preposterous.
The worst sequence was the chili scene. I won’t spoil it here, but let’s just say that it involved a mother forbidding her daughter to have sex. I get that they wanted to portray a controlling, domineering mother, but they went above and beyond to make her a pure villain, which felt too theatrical and unrealistic.
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Clara Sola looks great due to stunning cinematography, but this is still one of those films that focused too extensively on the visuals to tell its story, which led to a lot of boredom, excessive ambiguity and an overreliance on symbolism instead of concrete plot points. Too often I found the characters aggressively unlikable and the plot unreasonably pretentious and implausible to enjoy this movie more.
Clara Sola is a feminist drama that benefits from a well acted, solidly developed protagonist. It is also a gorgeously shot movie. The problem here stems from the film’s overreliance on visuals to tell the story, leading to excessive ambiguity and symbolism. A couple of characters were too aggressively unlikable and some plot points too preposterous and unhinged, which is why it was difficult to enjoy this overly strange drama.
My Rating – 3
This is the 19th film in my American Cinema Marathon where I will watch one film from each American country every day. Next up is 🇺🇸.
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