Eva + Candela

Eva + Candela is one of those middling WLW films that does not inspire me to craft a pithy, opening paragraph. Let’s just crack on with the review.

The film follows the relationship of Eva, an actress and Candela, a director. They initially meet on a project Candela is directing which receives a lot of buzz. The project marks both of them as up and coming talent. However, the buzz fades as does the passion of their relationship. Eventually, reality seeps in and upsets their relationship. Candela wants to have a child and they make changes to their lifestyle to do this. Candela begins a teaching position and Eva carries the child which impacts her career options.

The best thing about Eva + Candela is the cinematography. It’s a beautiful film to look at. Especially in portraying the early stages of their relationship. A lot of beautiful and effective montages are used to capture the feelings of this new relationship. Even the sex scenes are nice to look at. Filmed by an entirely female crew, the scenes do feel romantic instead of exploitative and the film’s stunning lighting remains present for these scenes.

Does the writing match the directing? Not fully. It’s not a bad written movie but the screenplay doesn’t exactly sing, either. This is a low-stakes relationship drama. These movies are difficult to rise above the status of just okay. In order for that to happen, the characters or screenplay overall needs to absolutely grab me or speak some new truths. Eva + Candela doesn’t. For all that the characters do feel like real people, there’s never enough justification for why there’s a movie about these characters. Movies about relationships really need to be great in order to be fully interesting. Eva + Candela is just good. So as such, I wasn’t always interested.

The acting is solid. The film relies a lot on the lead performances. Co-leads Silvia Varón and Alejandra Lara do a good job. They have great chemistry as a couple and are also talented actresses in their own right. Both effortlessly play romance as well as third act conflict. They commit fully to the borderline melodramatic argument scene near the end of the film. Their performances make that scene incredibly interesting and watchable even though the content of the dialogue doesn’t demand the amount of emotion these actresses bring to the table.

Eva + Candela is a film about filmmakers. There are lots of films on this topic and many good ones. However, I despair the popularity of the films about filmmakers genre. Films like these often feel like they were made about people in this profession because the writer couldn’t stretch themself enough to write about people in other professions. That feels like the case in Eva + Candela. While a film feeling personal can be good, a film like this makes me question the range of the writer and if they’re capable of writing characters different from themselves. Even Eva, as an actress not an actual filmmaker tends to get the short end of the stick as the film is often less sympathetic to her. There is an overall failure to make the personal feel universal.

Eva + Candela is good, but not great. It has nice cinematography which makes it a beautiful film to look at. But the writing and characters behind that story don’t feel original or deep enough to make this movie wholly succeed. Eva + Candela needed to do 20% more, especially in the writing department to bring it up from a mixed review to an outright positive review for me.

Overall rating: 5.3/10

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