Too Late to Die Young movie review (2019)
However, “Too Late to Die Young” is not a straightforward memoir movie. The film follows not one but three young characters—teenagers Sofía (Demian Hernández) and Lucas (Antar Machado) and the younger but equally conflicted Clara (Magdalena Tótoro). They are likely amalgamations of the director’s adventures both good and bad, stories she heard of other’s experiences, made-up “what if” scenarios and the existential crisis that sets in when you feel uprooted from your home. After a screening at last year’s New York Film Festival, Sotomayor said that in the process of recreating these memories, she’s no longer sure where reality stops and fantasies begin.
The setting is a remote woodsy place with no electricity, paved only by dirt roads, and access to a fresh water supply seems questionable. For the adults in the camp, it seems as if they are having an enjoyable time of returning to the land and creating a world of their own. The kids, too, spend much of their time scampering through trees and swimming in a makeshift pool under the idyllic summer sun of the holidays (it’s hot during the end of the year in the Southern Hemisphere). However, Sofía is not enjoying her time in nature. She’s the surliest teen in the bunch who openly argues with her father, crushes on an older stranger with a motorcycle and wants to rejoin her mother back in the city below the camp. Lucas is more the “suffers in silence” type. His longing gazes at Sofía are never returned. The tiny Clara plays against this teenage angst with problems of her own, especially when it comes to her dog Frida and her ailing dad. The group of kids and teens look over at the adults, and even the youngest among them can sense that the grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing.
Unlike the holier-than-thou separatist fantasy, “Captain Fantastic,” the politics that drove these settlers away from the city are not worn on the movie’s sleeves. Even if you knew nothing about 1990’s Chilean politics, you can get a sense that these upper-to-middle-class artists and idealists had the means to get away from it all. The neighboring city of Santiago, which looms large in one stunning shot of the horizon, responds in kind to its rejection. Almost every trip down from their pastoral commune ends with some kind of chaos, fight or resentment.
