The Burning Plain (2008)

Directed by: Guillermo Arriaga | 111 minutes | drama | Actors: Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger, Jennifer Lawrence, José María Yazpik, Joaquim de Almeida, Tessa Ia, Diego J. Torres, JD Pardo, Danny Pino, Brett Cullen, Gray Eubank, Toni Marie Lopez, Sean McGrath, Cesar Miramontes, Marty Papazian, TJ Plunkett, Chris Ranney, Aide Rodriguez, Fernanda Romero, Kacie Thomas, Robin Tunney, Malcolm Ullery, Stacy Marie Warden, Taylor Warden

The first scene of ‘The Burning Plain’ leaves little to the imagination: a young woman stands naked in front of a bedroom window in a dreary industrial town (Portland, Oregon), while commuter traffic rages by below. This Sylvia is not happy, as the rest of her day tells us: during a work break, the restaurant manager mutilates himself with a stone, only to end up in bed with the first male customer in the evening.

Subtle or not: Guillermo Arriaga’s creations keep you busy anyway. In his directorial debut, the screenwriter of ‘Amores Perros’, ’21 Grams’ and ‘Babel’ once again uses the mosaic process from the above films: various storylines are chronologically shuffled and connected in one or more ways. In the case of ‘The Burning Plain’ it concerns people who still have a proverbial bone to pick with each other due to the adultery of their parents. After all, the lovers died in a fire; a daughter of the woman and a son of the man seek each other out to reconstruct their own story and that of their respective parent.

Twice in fact: as a teenager and as an adult – and that’s one too many. Because although the premise of ‘The Burning Plain’ has the same potential as that of previous Arriaga screenplays, the characters remain in sketchiness and the film ends with an open but flat happy ending: at the end of such a film the main characters have to normally be purified, but what we see is just a sad-looking Sylvia – the only character who deserved focus.

‘The Burning Plain’ lacks that focus and therefore Kim Basinger (the mother) gets too much playing time with her flat comeback role; the adultery story lacks conviction and the motives are withheld from us. For the rest, ‘The Burning Plain’ has a lot in common with the aforementioned films, directed by Aléjandro González Iñárritu: the themes of guilt and fate, meeting of cultures, a believable setting, good young actors (Lawrence), stylish pictures and enchanting electric guitar music. . However, one of the main joys of laying a mosaic is the uncertainty of the end result, and the outcome of ‘The Burning Plain’ is practically revealed halfway through. Conclusion: arthouse at the start; soap with retroactive effect.