It took me 29 years, but I finally discovered that a solid two-and-a-half-week period is the longest amount of time I can spend under my parents’ roof before I start regressing to the point of slamming doors and growing out an emo hair swoop to cover my left eye (again). Try as I might, I can’t help the primal irritability that festers atop my pores upon stepping into my family’s old familiar dining room with the extending table and cheap record player, my father’s always-too-humid bathroom, or my older brother’s old man cave I’ve since inherited because my own childhood room has been converted into my mother’s craft supplies storage unit.
The house—perched atop a hill in Chula Vista, California—is hard to notice at first, obscured by vines and a tree I keep meaning to Google the name of but always forget. The yard is as unkempt as my father, a young 84 years old, allows it to be. I can picture every minute detail of my parents’ home—the chipped skin and the cluttered stomach—and truly long to be there. This, of course, can only happen as long as I’m still in Buffalo, NY. The moment I’m actually there, beyond the arrival gate of the San Diego airport, something in my wiring short-circuits, and suddenly no feelings of nostalgia are strong enough to unclench my jaw or make me not 16 again.
Perhaps this irritability emerges from the same place as my desire to see my parents—a desperate need for familiarity and routine, a couple rays of sunlight that behave accordingly, and a bean & cheese burrito that doesn’t taste like an apology from the East Coast. Perhaps, when I say I hate the feeling of coming home, what I’m trying to articulate is an embarrassed kind of love, a hardened affection for the life I thought I grew out of but keep crawling back to. Out of duty? Eh. Out of need? Ok, fine. Yes. I can’t help it. Every summer, it’s there, that childish urge to briefly, humiliatingly, step back in time.
This brings me to my parents, whom I love, but whom I find it difficult to love appropriately. By this, I mean: I find it difficult to love my parents without the words “oh my fucking god” and “stop micromanaging me” and “can you fucking knock?” These are not novel feelings, or at least, I hope they aren’t. My parents are anxious people, attracted to worst case scenarios. My father won’t fly on airplanes on account of superstition (in 2024, he might have a point) and my mom can’t (read: won’t) fall asleep when I’m home unless she can confirm that I’ve fallen asleep first. Others, on the outside, might interpret these behaviors as merely a type of peculiar parental care. For example, when my dad drops me off at the airport, I notice his hugs last a little longer, are always a little bit tighter. And yet. To be in proximity to my parents’s gnawing fears is to occasionally be swallowed by them. These behaviors have only become more and more amplified since I came out as a trans woman some six or seven years ago (at a certain point, you stop counting). My parents, who struggle with pronouns or any grammatical structure that isn’t what they learned in the 50s, want me always in their field of vision, and brace for me when I’ve stepped out from beyond the frame.
I make note of these tensions, quaint as they may seem, to say: parents are useful templates for development, in that they teach you the behaviors you should abandon simply by spending time with them. The film In the Summers (2024), directed by Alessandra Lacorazza, makes use of this tenuous configuration—the dance one does to avoid becoming their parents is a dance that only slightly works.
Structured in four acts—corresponding to four different summers—siblings Violeta and Eva visit their father Vicente and grow into themselves beneath the shadow of his sometimes-awkward charm and terrifyingly explosive gestures. Vicente (played without fault by René Pérez, the rapper known professionally as Residente) is an instantly knowable patriarch, equal parts naïve and tender, guided by uncertainty and a crushing fear of failure and the sneaking suspicion that he has, in fact, already failed. But failed what, exactly? His children are as angsty and entitled as children are expected to be, and yet, in their eyes, we see nothing but affection and the desire to be seen. Perhaps this is where the initial rift begins: in order to look out and truly see one’s kin, one must also learn to look inward, to know what’s at stake. Vicente turns instead to the bottle, suckles at the last remaining sparks of his dream to be a scientist, and wonders, silently, how to relate to the children who hunger for his attention, whom he can’t help but feel jealous of and sorry for.
Violeta and Eva, played by different actors across their development, are visual and emotional opposites. Violeta strives to match the masculine swagger of her father in form and temperament, while Eva, quiet and doting, observes these manly attitudes from the margins, somehow estranged from them. It’s Violeta who rebels first, and who receives the brunt of Vicente’s brutish insecurities—at one point, unable to articulate a feeling, he shoves her as a brother, or bully, might. The distance Vicente carves between them is one Eva tries, and fails, to fill once Violeta decides not to return during a crucial summer of becoming.
While all of this might sound like the shelf-stable ingredients of a classic after-school special, Lacorazza is too talented of a director to concern herself with histrionics. Rather, In the Summers succeeds in the quiet moments that cut through the simmering tensions of faded, dusty childhood dreams, uncertain adult futures, and shoddy attempts at open-hearted communications. In one particularly moving scene, Vicente guides Eva’s small hand, clutching a razor, across the field of his creamed head. She nicks the skin just slightly, and a drop of blood becomes a thing to laugh at, nothing more than an accident. This moment of intimacy helps to punctuate Vicente’s jarring emotional registers, as when he tries to entertain his kids by swerving dangerously from side to side in the middle of the road to mimic the jagged lurches of a rollercoaster. Is he trying to frighten them? Make them laugh? Introduce them to the idea that danger and play can often arrive at once?
The most moving moments of the film, for me, occur when Violeta—who has since transitioned—and Eva—who has since grown sullen—return to their father as young, post-grad adults. No longer hungering for the kind of attention one needs in their youth, the siblings must navigate the awkward terrain of their father’s life with new, clear eyes. And suddenly, it’s Vicente who needs them close, who craves their acknowledgment, who wants them to stay forever playing pick-up sticks with him on the carpet.
What, ultimately, is a “good” parent? Perhaps we think we know. But parents, like people, tend to step in and out of easy, simplified taxonomies. I think of my own parents, capable of great warmth and sudden coldness, and wonder if I’ll ever truly know them, or meet them as they want me to. And when I gossip about them with my siblings at the bar, I know we are allied in the feeling that, despite their shortcomings, despite all the times we wish they’d learned the words “I’m sorry,” we would kill if it meant we’d have more time to sit with them in front of the TV, watching reruns of Bones, or washing dishes together by hand. To be there, and to not be there at the same time. This is the feeling In the Summers asks us to sit with, in the company of all our disappointments, resentments, adorations, and wishes. The good, the bad, the ugly. The beautiful, too.
In the Summers is now playing in select theaters and will be available on digital platforms November 5.