Bring the camera closer to the hands, to the horse’s eye clouded by the impertinent flight of a fly, to the piercing sound of the stream, to the worm climbing up the arm, to the tulle of the party dress. Nathalie Álvarez acknowledges that she likes to get closer to things that are alive, but especially to the joints, because of trying to get the most out of the postgraduate course in mime that she studied. The Costa Rican director takes over in “Clara Sola” -her film debut of her in the feature with which she was nominated for the past Platinum Awards for best first film and best cinematography- of the female voice of Clara, a forty-year-old woman connected with the most exacerbated faces of Spirituality –to the point that the townspeople come to her to cure ailments such as blindness– more attached to the land than to people and forced to live with the censorious oppression of an extremely religious mother who isolates and censors its incipient sexual drives.
Regarding the physicality of his shots, Álvarez comments that “the truth is that I have a fascination with hands and, in the specific case of Clara, it could be said that we work with them almost like roots. He thought of that kind of characters that look fragile from afar but at the same time they are capable of breaking you with their own fingers if you get closer than is desirable for her. She is not a victim and she can use her hands to defend herself, to give herself pleasure, to feel, to listen to the earth. All that sensorial fascination that she has for nature is capable of being carried out through her hands”.
The language of nature, transmitted in this case through a kind of magical realism, is the one that this sensitive and at times inaccessible protagonist understands best, in part, because “nature is the only one that does not demand anything of him. Interacting with humans, she acquires a role that has been given to her and that she tries to continue assuming, even though it is not what she wants. On the other hand, when she is alone with nature, she does not have to pretend anything, she can be her and that is why she feels so comfortable. That is something that I think many of us can have in common, that being alone with the earth you don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to be anyone”.
sexual discovery
As Antonella Sudasassi did in “Awakening of the Ants”, female desire is presented as something incipiently guilty but at the same time animal, inevitable, instinctive, although conditioned by an element such as religion: “Sexual discovery anywhere in the world that is Catholic is always going to be complicated.”
In the same way that in a country like Costa Rica, religion can be associated with everything that heals, it is also easily associated with what it blocks and prevents: “among other things, because it is a patriarchal religion and conditions women, as in Clara’s case in a more resounding way. At first he feels guilty for the pleasure he experiences, he limits himself in some way. In our case, in the case of women, the image of the Virgin is the aspirational element par excellence, something that is impossible because it is Virgin and Mother at the same time, something impossible. But fortunately we have come a long way in this direction and I think we have also learned to be freer. It is no longer so sacred to be a virgin at marriage. Hopefully this movie will serve to continue walking together on that path of respect and freedom, “he concludes.