Rent Clara Sola (2021)

Powerful fable of love and repression - Clara Sola review by PD

This one, the debut feature from Costa Rican/Swedish director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén, is a 'Carrie'-accented portrait of feminine power that finds its holy fool of a heroine striving for her own kind of religious freedom. In some ways, Clara (Wendy Chinchilla Araya) is the most liberated woman in the remote, and deceptively matriarchal Costa Rican village where she 'works for God'. A semi-feral 40-year-old who they say was once visited by the Virgin Mary, Clara has been moulded into a faith healer by her pious mother, who’s successfully rebranded her daughter’s curved spine and childlike intellect as symptoms of divinity. Aside from miracles on demand, little is expected of her - Clara is free to spend her days wandering through the forest, caring for her beloved white horse Yuca, and making homes for the beetles she finds in the wild. That is, as long as it doesn’t displease her mother. For Fresia keeps her only surviving daughter on a tight leash, especially now that Clara’s sister — the jewel of her family — has 'gone to heaven', leaving behind Maria, a bright-eyed daughter of her own. Clara is treated like a young child throughout, and, even more worryingly, Fresia denies Clara the free surgery that would straighten her spine: “God gave her to me like this,” she explains.

The tension at the heart of the film is rooted in Araya’s gripping performance (a professional dancer's first screen role), which more than delivers on the potential of casting someone with such exquisite control of her body in the part of a disabled woman who has such precious little control over her life. From the opening frames of Clara reaching towards Yuca — Araya’s hands grasping at the air as if trying to pull the horse closer at the same time as they hope to escape from her wrists — 'Clara Sola' is fleshed with the feeling that love and repression are braided together. A richly symbolic and increasingly tense fable, Mesén’s film may be steeped in Catholic religiosity, but it ultimately places what’s left of its faith in the act of letting go - no small feat given the patriarchal systems that they've inherited (there’s a distinct sense of self-denial to how Fresia, Clara, and Mariá have embraced their respective roles before the story begins and a man turns everything upside down) - they suffocate each other, if without malice. For her part, Mariá is an unwitting participant in the patriarchy; she spends the film preparing for her 'quinceañera' and carousing around with her much older boyfriend, (the remarkably tender Santiago - and the only one who recognizes that Clara has more to offer beyond the role she was born to play), activities that are rendered with remarkable even-handedness. The festivities inevitably becomes a venue for quasi-supernatural violence in a way that cements the film’s connection to 'Carrie,' but the party is painted more as an opportunity for empowerment than it is for horror.

The handheld cinematography and a trembling violin score combine to suggest that Carla is being seduced back to the earth — that she’s gradually rejecting the mortal world that had always rejected her in return. It isn’t easy for Clara to let go of the context that has caged her in, nor is it easy for Mesén to illustrate what that looks like; if the ending feels a little clumsy, that’s only so because the rest of the film is carried by a defiant refusal to play by the rules. Powerful stuff.