My first question when I see another love triangle/toxic relationship plotline in a teen drama is: "Is this really what teenage girls want?" The thing is, the people writing these stories, producing these films, are mostly millennials, and while I fall into the category of people who didn't fully experience the love triangle craze (due to age), what we're seeing now is worse than mediocre, it's simply bad.
However, the truth is, at the time, the love triangle felt novel; honestly, it divided opinions and generated a lot of anticipation and excitement. In the era of Twilight and The Hunger Games, these triangles felt more believable, possibly because they felt genuine, rather than forced. This is what worked in The Summer I Turned Pretty. It's believable that both brothers are obsessed with Belly because they grew up with her, but she ended up paying attention to only one of them.
Director: Denis Rovira van Boekholt
Writer: Jaime Vaca
Stars: Alícia Falcó, Fernando Lindez, Diego Vidales
But when it comes to a toxic story like this, where nobody is friends with anyone, everyone is mopey, and there's a constant sense of angst, it's really uninteresting to watch two brothers fighting over a girl. Another problem is that none of these characters feel well-developed in this first film. I suppose if I had read the books, I would have more context about what's going on, but it seems the filmmakers don't want to give us any kind of background information. To have a compelling story, you need compelling characters that draw you in somehow.
In this case, there's literally nothing that makes you care about these characters. Kamila doesn't even seem like a main character, aside from the fact that all the girls envy her and she's in a love triangle. The point of fictional characters in a romance story is for them to have personality; nobody, and I mean nobody, in this film has a personality. And if you tell me that a mopey guy, who's mopey because of something that happened to him in the past, is an example of good characterization, then I'm out of this conversation.
Honestly, we don't need characters like Thiago anymore. All these men need therapy, and no, this is not what we should be encouraging in young girls. They're not babysitters; they're supposed to be equals in the romantic relationship. Also, what's with the pacing of movies these days? There's literally no real starting point. Everything feels like there's context we've missed, and there's nothing that feels like a story is being told; it's almost like random scenes strung together. There are some characters who appear out of nowhere, specifically because they have to fulfill a cliché.
What's the story of this movie, you might ask? Well, honestly, I'm at a loss for words. The story is about Kamila, a young girl whose neighbors moved away when she was little due to a significant incident, but one day, several years later, when they're all teenagers, the neighbors return. The Di Bianco brothers are different from each other, but in what way? We don't really find out. We're just supposed to know that one is older and brooding, and the other is a bit more free-spirited and youthful. Nobody knows what's really going on with them, because they're just representatives of certain clichés.
What makes them special among the plethora of characters we've seen like this in just the last year? Nobody knows. This is what makes this movie completely disappointing to me. But the question everyone is waiting for me to answer is: is it actually hot? Because, what else do we watch these movies for? My answer is: meh. Especially compared to the much more sensual and complex My Fault, I think there's nothing here worth watching. It's not even going to satisfy that need, if you know what I mean.
I think the actors do a decent job with what little they're given. Alicia Falco is striking as Kamila, but she also looks incredibly young, which almost makes me feel like a pervert, considering the characters are supposed to be in high school. To be honest, I think the childhood story had potential, but it gets completely lost in everything else that happens in the movie. Yes, I could consider myself one of those people who watched the Guilty saga purely out of morbid curiosity (I watched it for work, okay?), but even so, I was curious to see what would happen next. In this case, I have no interest whatsoever.
Honestly, I just realized that if I had to describe the romance in this story, I could say it's friends who become lovers, enemies who become lovers, a love triangle, or childhood friends who become lovers, and somehow all the descriptions would fit, but none of them are truly accurate. Ultimately, there's nothing new here.
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