Sand Dollars

In the small seaside city of Las Terrenas, in the Dominican Republic, Noeli (Yanet Mojica), a local in her early 20s, navigates a complicated relationship with a wealthy, much older woman, Anne (Geraldine Chaplin), whose drifting expat existence forms a counterpoint to her young lover’s daily hustle. That hustle includes other players: briefly, an older Frenchman who takes his leave, and, more significantly, Noeli’s steady boyfriend, Yeremi (Ricardo Ariel Toribio), whom she passes off to a willfully, wistfully ignorant Anne as her brother. There’s pathos in Anne’s fragile, poorly constructed delusions about a relationship that is, to a large if undisclosed degree, transactional, but also in Noeli’s attempts to hold together the starkly disparate pieces of her life. In the hands of writing-directing team Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán, the drama records these quiet tensions but skirts judgment, making a measured, almost delicate exploration of the cultural intersections resulting from the island tourism trade. Gorgeously filmed scenes of the women swimming, dancing in nightclubs or whiling away the afternoon in Anne’s idyllic beach hotel have a lyrical quality—the dreamy landscape presenting a lovely, haunting backdrop for their melancholy tale. —Lynn Rapoport