Argentinian filmmaker Ana Katz presented herself with this humorous drama set in the summer of 1990 at the festival in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, where she received a special jury award. Argentine veteran Mercedes Moran won the award for best actress at the same festival, while Gustavo Garzon was awarded the best Argentine actor of the year. Moran and Garzon are husband and wife, Lucrecia and Pedro, who with their teenage children, Juliana and Flor, left Buenos Aires for a summer vacation in the Brazilian city of Florianopolis, 1,750 kilometers away. They loaded the car to the top so that it almost scraped the road, and the possible illusion of a harmonious and functional family was shattered very quickly.
These two psychologists by profession have been living apart for some time, but they decided to go on a summer vacation together, in which a local guy will get involved, and his family will accidentally bump into him along the way. When they run out of gas along the way, Marco (Marco Rizza) will come to their aid, with whom they will also find accommodation after they realize that the house they booked is not ideal for a vacation and is literally crawling with rats. Although both Lucrecia and Pedro, at least it seems, are on the threshold of their sixties or have already stepped into them, both seem to be going through a midlife crisis, and Marco is in a similar phase, who also still lives with his ex-partner and son. As the summer vacation is the ideal time for freer and more relaxed behavior, the female part of this Argentinian family will embark on some adventures with their Brazilian hosts, while Pedro’s dreams of a summer vacation as an opportunity to get closer to his wife will evaporate.
It was shot by Katz, who wrote the script together with her brother Daniel in a somewhat nostalgic spirit, aesthetically in a retro touch, so everything there and visually seems as if it was the turn of the eighties and nineties, when tourism in Brazil was apparently at similar levels as here. There are no apartments here, but tourists break into the houses of renters who move into pantries or garages during the summer, and the host’s first reaction when they see a family of Argentines is, isn’t there a sea in your area? Although the topic of marriage breakdown is not exactly one of those that comes to mind when comedy is mentioned, “Florianopolis Dream” (Sueno Florianopolis in the original) is one of those light films that still failed to rise above mediocrity.