Border Romance

August Evening Directed by Chris Eska, at Village East Cinema Running Time: 127 min.

With a healthy dose of good intentions, Chris Eska’s August Evening has the fine-tuned backbone of an observant family drama. Shot using the warm, expressive colors of the Texas landscape to evoke longing for beauty and constant isolation, Eska tells the story of a young widow named Lupe (Veronica Loren), whose downtrodden existence slowly unfurls with a calculated pace. Living at home with her late husband’s parents, she finds herself hopelessly adrift with her kindly father-in-law (Pedro Castaneda) after he also becomes widowed.

The duo’s frequent attempts to assimilate as they wander in search of work starts to feel redundant after the first few examples, but Eska’s characters are well-honed, never once straining credibility. Unlike Todd McCarthy’s The Visitor, a meek tale of struggling immigrants in NYC, August Evening doesn’t need a nebbishy white character for the audience to feel close to the material. 

Lupe’s progression from kitchen to factory work over the course of the moderately paced story recalls another marriage of immigrant despair and impractical American dreams, Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation. But unlike Nation, Eska’s plot continually relates Lupe’s surroundings to her personal troubles. With lyrical interpretations of impoverished lifestyles and transcendent visual motifs based around the Zen of the countryside, August Evening evokes both Killer of Sheep and Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, but it’s not quite as audacious.

Eska manages to superimpose downtrodden personalities on an authentic setting, making it a compelling exercise in atmospheric storytelling. Lupe’s newfound romance with another local remains utterly predictable, settling for the earnest implication that companionship holds the key to surviving class struggle. Without drawing battle lines, the movie does call out the pervasive social tension. “If we hadn’t lost,” one elder immigrant remarks to another, making an oblique reference to the Mexican-American War, “all the whites would be pouring across the border.”