I Have Electric Dreams

What happens when a ne’er do well grows up? What happens if he has a family but never really grows up? What happens to his kid?

Those are the central questions in I Have Electric Dreams (Tengo sueños eléctricos), Costa Rican director Valentina Maurel’s family drama showing at the Locarno Film Festival. As with her Cannes-screened short film Lucia en el Limbo, I Have Electric Dreams is concerned with a young girl’s dreams, desires, and angst. But unlike that short, this new project is capacious enough for two other characters—a father and a mother.

It is because of these other (frankly less-than-mature) people that Maurel’s new story becomes more than a teenager’s coming-of-age tale. In fact, it is possible and even plausible to think of I Have Electric Dreams as a coming-of-age story of one girl, Eva (outstanding newcomer Daniela Marin Navarro), and her father, Martin, but the train has left the station for the latter. Whatever redemption is possible for these characters, the father figure is already far out of the circle of grace. He can never be of age.

But perhaps Maurel, who is also responsible for the screenplay, has stacked too many things against her film’s major male character—he has no job, no home, and no wife. As played by Reinaldo Amien Gutierrez, he is charming on occasion but he is also a man who never quite tamed his anger and now, having no reason to pretend to be an adult save for his daughter, who implicitly gives him permission, he spirals. His dreams of being a poet have vapourised along with his ability to develop the sitzfleisch required to sit still and be productive, a fact he seems to have admitted to himself.

Meanwhile, his former wife has come into some money courtesy of an inheritance and his own drifting existence is in sharp contrast to her new fortune. And yet, their daughter loves him enough to want to be around him, which might not be an entirely unselfish impulse. After all, his new instability is appealing for a teenager in the throes of an undirected rebellion. She smokes cigarettes around him and he provides her with the opportunity, inadvertently, to lose her virginity, a plot point that ties Eva to Lucia, the protagonist from Maurel’s Lucia en el Limbo. In one scene, her mother cautions her against the love she has for her father and “other men”. A part of that caution is jealousy, but there is a part of it that is from genuine concern.

There is a lot to admire in I Have Electric Dreams. The actors are terrific throughout, the writing is potent, and the cinematography is unobtrusive. In some ways, the father figure’s neurosis comes out much more clearly than his daughter’s craze. There is a hint in the title: it is taken from an incomplete poem written by Martin about the film’s central relationship. Two lines from the poem convey its essence: “the rage that burns through us doesn’t belong to us” and “we scream our love for each other, sometimes with blows”.

It is this dysfunction that is attractive to Maurel. She conveys it quite well but perhaps needs a film or two more to better calibrate her narrative pacing. In the meantime, I Have Electric Dreams should slake the thirst of family-film-loving audiences larger than one expects for arthouse projects.