To this day, political violence continues to be an issue in Peru, though the ‘80s and ’90s — when the Maoist guerrilla movement Shining Path waged bloody conflicts against the Peruvian government before being crushed by President Alberto Fujimori — are considered the country’s rock-bottom.
“Reinas,” by the Swiss-Peruvian filmmaker Klaudia Reynicke, takes place during this tumultuous period. For most of the running time, it keeps politics on the margins, like a phantom presence looming over the members of one bourgeois family’s everyday lives.
The principal characters are two sisters, the teenage Aurora (Luana Vega) and her younger sister, Lucia (Abril Gjurinovic), both of whom can’t entirely wrap their heads around why their mother, Elena (Jimena Lindo), wants so desperately to leave Lima.
Preventing their departure is the girls’ estranged father Carlos (Gonzalo Molina), a taxi driver who decides to reconnect with his daughters on hearing that Elena might soon whisk them away to the United States. Both parents must sign a notarized form for their children to leave the country, but Carlos stalls, and his renewed interest in the family gives Aurora (whose world seems to revolve around her friends and the beach) hope that she might be able to stay behind with him.
More compelling than this somewhat unconvincing family dynamic, structured around the coming-of-age arc and the trite theme of learning to let go, is the film’s intimate sense of time and place, and the subtly effective manner by which the grim social context is made known (such as a citywide curfew and sugar shortage). Seemingly inconsequential moments — like a cozy house party scene — shine with loving specificity, making the perpetual return to the Carlos drama feel dutiful. In this case, thematic focus is bit of a buzz kill, pulling an otherwise unique portrait onto generic grounds.
The post ‘Reinas’ Review: Memories of Lima appeared first on New York Times.
