Las Hijas de Abril (April's Daughters)
In less than ten years, Michel Franco has directed five feature films, and has won three awards at Cannes Film Festival; certainly that's not a bad run for a director that hasn't turn 40 years old yet. His hyper realist films that deal with the most dramatic moments in the life of middle class people have already stablished him as one of the most promising Latin American indie directors. Las Hijas de Abril (April's Daughters) won the Special Jury Prize at the Un Certain Regard competition in this year's Cannes Festival. The jury, fronted by Uma Thurman, quoted "the incredible interpretation of actors" and "the inspired and brilliant direction" as the reasons of awarding this film.
But before the acting and the directing, what strikes you most of Las Hijas de Abril, is the special storytelling used to construct the backbone of the story. Franco is a minimalist, but also a provocateur, much in the style of Michael Haneke and early Lars Von Trier, restricting the access of information, letting us into the intimacy of their characters knowing that things are not right but not quite understanding why, and finally let their micro-universe burn.
Las Hijas de Abril is full of people doing stupid things. We hate the characters because they act in irrational ways, but they are crafted so well, that their motives are completely human; it is their natural imperfection the ones that make them chose the most idiotic resolutions, ones that we can't believe that they could do, but ones that we have witnessed among people in our real lives do once and again. Emma Suárez offers is fantastic as Abril, the woman that goes back to look after her teenager daughter when she founds that she is about to have a baby. Franco is one of those directors that likes to work with non-actors, but here, some of them really struggle (the elder daughter, the boyfriend) when they are paired with someone as good as Suárez; it is only Ana Valeria Becerril as the pregnant young girl the one who is able to stand at the veteran actress' height, and their acting duel gets the best scenes.
Franco contains the narrative, never allowing it to get close to melodrama, and instead frames long takes of the life of this dysfunctional family to intensify the sense of realism. He moves with a slow but steady pace, but keeps adding plot twist that make the story moving forward and to points of no return. Even though, there are characters and situations introduced but later forgotten and left in the air. But above all, Franco avoids moral judgments (in the way he has done a few times in the past) and let pass his voyeuristic regard as a testament on how human passions can derail our lifes.
