'The Burning Plain' review

Directed by Guillermo Arriaga

By Venuszine Administrator
Published: October 1st, 2009 | 4:49pm

Sylvia (Charlize Theron) is a successful restauranteur who is also a self-mutilating sex addict haunted by a past of infernal sadness. Interspersed throughout the film is the parallel narrative of Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) and Santiago (J.D. Pardo), two youths brought together by the odd circumstances of Mariana’s mother (Kim Basinger) and Santiago’s father (Joaquim de Almeida) going up in flames in a trailer while they carried on an affair.

Casual viewers disdain narrative acrobatics like Guillermo Arriaga’s, but when there’s not as much going on, rewards are bountiful for the observant. The film unravels like a listless viewing of a photo album. Scenes move and change based on memory and feeling of action rather than action itself, all of which is captured beautifully by Robert Elswit’s and John Toll’s cinematography which makes the Portland blanket of grey as traumatic and suffocating as flames in an open desert. The atmosphere is accentuated further with the minimalisitic score by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Hans Zimmer, an unexepected but affecting choice. — Chris R. Morgan