The Burning Plain

Venice 2008: the first big film of this year’s Competition hits the Lido. Down in the desert, an abandoned camper is burning.

Sylvia, a sophisticated restaurant manager in Portland, tries to catch up with her past. In an anonymous border town, teenagers Mariana and Santiago meet at his father’s funeral and establish a sweet albeit silent relationship. Maria, 12 years old, runs through a crop field where her father’s dusting plane just crashed. Gina and Nick meet on a desert road to consume their illicit passion. In the course of the film, the relationships between the characters become clear, love is spent, tears are shed, until a terrible secret of murder is revealed.

After a universally praised trilogy (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel)  the partnership between Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu and scriptwriter Guillermo Arriaga breaks up.  Inarritu’s next project is currently in pre-production,  but The Burning Plain, Arriaga's directing debut  is a drama that is made to sweep the board at the next Academy Awards. A large part of the credit is due to leading ladies Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger, who is still sexy and captivating at 55. Both give lifetime performances and deserve big kudos.

As always in Arriaga’s scripts, the timeline is fragmented and keeps leaping backward and forward. His favourite themes are love, sin, guilt, death. Heavy stuff. One could imagine that after the split from Inarritu, he might have an awkward hand at directing but could count on a rock-steady script. Quite the opposite. At its best, ( and despite the great acting performances ) The Burning Plain is a decent mainstream melodrama with a penchant for close ups and meaningful monologues; but too often, the story is weighted down by a farraginous script that strives to illustrate and explain every single detail of the plot. The result is predictable and at times superficial.  Dialogues don’t help: “Where are we going to live?” “We’ll live in peace” “We’ll never find peace” is too naive an exchange even for two teenagers in love.

The impression is that Arriaga has concentrated too much on his directing skills and left behind all the assets that made him famous, trading raw passion for mannerism and grandeur for prolixity. One wishes that he finally breaks free from the chains of melodrama and deploys his many talents in a more original, dynamic and lively genre.

Vera Brozzoni