The first image of ‘Carajita’ is very suggestive: a night shot that shows on the left the sea caressing the shore and, on the right, some plants illuminated with the blue and red light of a police car. In the scenes that follow, the narrative voice of a teenager, the sound and the sometimes sleepy images, place us in a somewhat disconcerting visual and emotional territory, since we still do not understand the nature of the relationships between the two protagonists, a young 17 years old and her 36-year-old nanny who, at times, seem to play the roles of a daughter and a mother.
The ‘strange couple’ formed by the Catalan director Ulises Porra and the Argentine director Silvia Schnicer is filming a curious film in the Dominican Republic, with a staging that is sometimes direct and at other times more abstract, which hovers over class conflict, relationships of power and biased emotions. At times, the film puts form before content, although it may not be a thoughtful decision: What he tells ends up being somewhat predictable, while the way he tells it, a visual style made up of many contrasts, takes precedence over the vagaries of the story and suggests more to us than the story itself. Important things happen that we do not see, intuit or imagine, prevailing above all the tone, the atmosphere, that lethargic feeling expressed by the images and the pause of the voices.