The Burning Plain

Guillermo Arriaga is known as a writer who came to worldwide attention with the blistering Amores perros, the thought provoking 21 Grams and the Oscar-winning Babel.  After two short films he has decided to try his hand at directing a feature, eight years after his last directorial effort, with The Burning Plain which he also wrote. 
 
As with the films with which he made his name, The Burning Plain concerns several disparate main characters in different areas of the US and Mexico who are somehow linked.  The film begins in an apartment where restaurant manager Sylvia has just woken up and, leaving a man asleep in bed, walks to the window and stares out blankly, giving the children walking to school an eyeful.  Her emotional detachment from this sexual encounter is only partly to do with the man being a chef at her restaurant and more to do with a traumatic event in her past that has left her permanently scarred.
 
 

 
Meanwhile, a young girl, Maria, in Mexico lives with her father and his best friend as her mother is nowhere to be found and follows them around in their job as crop dusters.  A serious accident changes this peaceful existence and forces Maria to search for her mother.
 
In a border town the recently orphaned teenage boy, Santiago, the son of a 'wetback' immigrant worker begins seeing Mariana, the daughter of the woman with whom his father died.  Their relationship is one of forbidden love as Mariana's family blame Santiago's father for the deaths.
 
This seems to follow the same pattern as Guillermo Arriaga's other films and I'm beginning  to get the impression that he challenges a couple of friends to provide him with characters, places, character traits and obstacles for him to weave an intricate web linking them together before the deadline.  Here's an example:
Main Characters: A UPS driver from LA; a waitress from Tijuana working in Austin and a Mexican Senator.
Character Traits: Substance abuse; non identical twins separated at birth and marital infidelity.
Obstacle: A near fatal car crash.
Guillermo, you have 4 weeks starting... now!
 
  
 
There is something about his later films that seem both wonderfully complex and horribly convoluted in equal measure and whilst the early material was fresh and hard hitting it has recently felt more forced and drawn-out for the point of being intricate rather than for any artistic reasons.  With its split narratives, The Burning Plain has moments of extreme tedium and annoyance which outweighs the undoubted skill of the screenwriting.
 
The acting is universally good with Charlize Theron excellent as Sylvia, looking drawn and vacant, with Kim Bassinger giving her best performance since LA Confidential.  The young actors playing Mariana and Santiago (Jennifer Lawrence and JD Pardo) are very accomplished but overshadowed by Tessa Ia, who has a massive future if her portrayal of Maria is anything to go by.
 
As frustrating as it is intriguing, The Burning Plain is by no means Arriaga's best screenplay though his direction is perfectly adequate and impressive for a debut feature. 
 
 

The Disc

 
Picture and Sound
I was only supplied with a DVD-R with a tracker and incorrect aspect ratio but it did look handsomely photographed and the location shooting was used well to convey the differences and similarities between people in different circumstances and areas.
 
The disc only came with a stereo soundtrack which I imagine won't be the case on either the retail DVD or Blu-ray though I have been assured that, like the DVD-R, neither will have any extra features.
 
 

 
 
Final Thoughts
Guillermo Arriaga burst onto the scene with the fantastic Amores peros and his collaboration with Alejandro González Iñárritu produced another two films before Arriaga and he went their separate ways with him scripting Tommy Lee Jones' superb western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada the year before Babel and now directing his own film.
 
It seems that there is only so much you can do with the same formula before it begins to tire and lose its punch - M. Night Shyamalan suffers from the same problem with audiences now looking for the twist rather than it catching them unawares - The Burning Plain is by no means a bad film, it's just that it follows in such illustrious footsteps that it suffers by comparison.  If you are a fan of Arriaga's work then it's definitely worth a look though the vanilla nature of the disc means that a rental is probably the way to go.

I tried to write this review giving away as little as possible so you could watch the film without any preconceptions about how events unfold and charaters link.  Unfortunately the trailer practically gives everything away so I'd avoid it if you plan to watch the film at all.