The film by Costa Rican feature debutant Nathalie Alvarez Mesen was another typical offshoot of Latin American cinema in which naturalism and magical realism are mixed. The authenticity of the entire story, set in an isolated Costa Rican village located on the edge of the jungle, is enhanced by the fact that practically all the characters were played by female actors, while the main role, the mentally undercapacitated 40-year-old Clara, was played by a professional dancer from Colombia, Wendy Chinchilla Araya. “Clara Solo” can also be seen as a belated coming-of-age, because although Clara is 40 years old, she is almost at the level of a little girl and lives in the tight grip of her mother, who treats her not only overprotectively, but also due to typical primitive religious fatalism, she does not allow herself to undergo spinal surgery that would make her life much easier.
God made my Clara the way she is and there is nothing to change, says the mother to the doctor, who assures her that there is no need to pay for the operation, which is covered by the health system, but the mother is inexorable. As it is a primitive community, there are also ubiquitous religious rituals in something that acts as a typical Latin American mix of Catholicism and some ancient shamanic religions in which Clara is the central figure and they believe that through her God heals the villagers while she takes over all these diseases. Due to her mental retardation and physical deformity, everyone in the village takes Clara somewhat lightly and no one takes her seriously, but at the same time they consider her almost a holy figure.
However, Maria, Clara’s niece, lives with Clara and her mother, a teenager who is just at the age when she “turns” from a girl into a woman, and this is obviously a period that Clara missed. Of course, not physically, but her mother clearly did not allow her to grow into an adult woman, and when a young hired worker Santiago appears in the village, Clara will decide that it is time to break free from her mother’s tight grip and that the time has come for delayed puberty. As the author Alvarez Mesen has been living and working in Sweden for a long time, “Clara Sola” stylistically owes as much to Latin American magical realism as it does to European arty style, so the story develops slowly there, and the entire film was filmed with a hand-held camera.
Thus, this woman, whose figure and appearance almost resembles a wild animal from the jungle, will find herself in a conflict between some pure, divine, almost saintly mission instilled in her head by her mother and the typically human instinct, desire and need to realize herself. something that has been suppressed for a long time and is waiting to explode and is in contrast to the first one. “Clara Sola” premiered during the director’s evenings of the festival in Cannes and Alvarez Mesen was nominated for the best debut actress, but the award was “stolen” by the Croatian Antonela Alamat Kusijanović with “Murina”. Although the basic idea, especially the setting in this film were extremely interesting, “Clara Sola” was another in a series of films with an extremely slow pace, which for the most part ruined the overall impression for me.