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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
THE BURNING PLAIN Beautiful people suffering is a motif that never gets old. She’s tortured, but she looks so lovely when she cries. He’s repressed, but the tension in his face only brings out the manly line of his jaw. And so on and so forth. All the characters in Burning Plain are riddled with psychological trauma, and all are ridiculously attractive, despite the attempts by makeup artists to make the stars look just like normal people. When you have Charlize Theron and Kim Basigner in your cast, it’s hard to do ugly. The men, too, are equally gorgeous (J. D. Pardo, who plays Santiago, was a former model). But really, is angst quite so tragic when it affects Average Joes and Janes? Guillermo Arriaga, writer of the films Babel and Amores Perros, adds the title of director to his credits with this, his first feature. Like his other movies, he uses interweaving story lines and temporal shifts to emphasize the connections between seemingly disparate characters. Since his style is becoming somewhat overdone (Crash cashed in on it with great success), there isn’t much suspense in the story itself. The audience quickly figures out who is who and who is related to whom and what this person did to that person with relative ease by the middle of the film. The event around which all past, present, and future action revolves is an explosive affair between housewife Gina (Basinger) and her lover, Nick (Joaquim de Almeida). Their deaths trigger repercussions between their families, especially between Gina’s daughter Marianna (a luminous Jennifer Lawrence) and Nick’s son Santiago (Pardo). The relationship that develops between the two teenagers has grave repercussions for Sylvia, a beautiful restaurateur who cuts herself in between her liaisons with random men. These three blonde women, Gina, Sylvia, and Mariana, are the heart of the film. As the first two, Basinger and Theron give excellent performances, but it is Lawrence who is the standout. The strength and cold resolution with which she embodies Mariana contrasts sharply with the inherent vulnerability of her youth. Contrast is the name of the game for Arriaga, who juxtaposes past and present, happiness and sorrow, even white and Latino with excellent effect. Unlike Babel and Amores Perros, he avoids finding the connections between apparent strangers. All the characters in Burning Plain are closely related, which gives an immediate resonance to his story. Watching a naked Sylvia staring
out a window on a cold, gray winter morning, her face haunted and drawn,
you sense her demons will never allow her to rest. Of course, given that
Theron plays her, you don’t want that pathos to
end. Suffering has its attractions, after all. Lisa Bernier
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