Dir. Joshua Marston, 2004, USA/Colombia, 101 mins
Cast: Catalina Sandino Moreno, Yenny Paola Vega, Guilied Lopez, Wilson Guerrero, Jaime Osorio Gomez
Writer and director Joshua Marston's feature debut is a small but deeply affecting film. Based on the tales of real life drug mules, Maria Full of Grace tells the story of Mara Alvarez (Moreno), a 17-year-old Columbian girl who agrees to smuggle heroin into the United States, a decision which could change her financial situation forever, but which could also cost Maria her future and even her life.
The film is beautifully simple in structure and deployment. The narrative is strong and unfussy while the script is sparse and to the point, giving its charismatic protagonist plenty of opportunity to convey a range of emotions through facial expression and body language. The realism of the film - the hand held camera, minimal lighting and unostentatious mis-en-scene - compliments the political side to the subject matter, giving what is in fact a hybrid of tense thriller and intense melodrama a strikingly stark essence. The viewer is given a firm impression that they are watching a close representation to real goings on.
Maria Full of Grace is also sleekly put together - its realism conceals the extreme efficiency of the script, in which all redundancies (i.e. overt sentimentalism) have been ruthlessly excised. This has the effect of moving the story along in every scene, swiftly up-scaling the suspense and drama. Yet Marston sensibly starts his story at a very human level, in which we witness Maria with her family and friends, enabling us to understand and empathise with his heroine before he throws her in at the deep end. By the time Maria and her friend Blanca (Vega) are with the other mules on the plane, the audience has invested so much with the characters that the journey is astonishingly terrifying and exciting - and yet without any of the frivolity that often accompanies the thriller genre.
Perhaps the real strength this film lies in the character of Maria herself, brought into myriad dimensions by Catalina Sandino Moreno. Like her story, Maria is simple and beautifully drawn. Her desires, be they to copulate on top of a roof or to dance at a party, are the extension of her ideals - of her wish for freedom. She refuses to marry out of convenience or custom and resents that she must support her sister and her son. Yet Marston shades Maria subtly, without relying on overblown set-ups. Although she resents her sister she defends her from her boyfriend Juan (Guerrero). When she quits her job after becoming frustrated we do not in actual fact witness this act of rebellion, for it is not in the workplace but in her family that her loyalties and ties begin, and thus it is within a family set up that we discover this fact.
There are two particularly striking metaphors in the film; firstly the sight of Maria trimming the thorns off roses and of Blanca packaging them up further down the factory line, which starkly recalls the restraints placed upon them as spirited young women with few options living in a poor society. The other takes place when Maria embarks on her mission. An eerie parallel is drawn with the taking of the sacraments; the sight of her employer Javier (Gomez) proffering the white latex pellets containing heroin is deeply unsettling - the second Maria swallows her first pellet she changes the direction of her life incontrovertibly, aligning herself to whatever this man dictates.
Maria Full of Grace has won many prestigious awards, including Catalina Sandino Moreno's nomination for Best Actress at the 2005 Oscars,
Audience Award at Sundance Festival, Best Actress (The Silver Bear) and Best First Film (Alfred Bauer Prize) at the Berlin Film Festival, and it is easy to see why. It is a moving human drama based around a thought provoking issue, put together in such a way that one feels almost personally immersed in the dangerous journey of its protagonist, and wonderfully satiated by its ending.
William J Davis
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