Guatemala sits south of Mexico and Belize, between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean, above Honduras and El Salvador. This most populous country of Central America comprised the ancient core of the Maya civilization. In 1519, the Spanish began their wars of conquest, first siding with the native Kaqchikel to decimate the rival Quiche, then decimating the Kaqchikel themselves. After 300 years of European rule, Guatemala became a free republic; 100 years later, the U.S. deposed the democratic leader and has been meddling ever since. Now Guatemala fights back with its first Oscar contender, Ixcanul , opening August 26 at Opera Plaza.
Ixcanul is a feature-length movie with about 30 minutes of story. This leaves plenty of room for long takes that have little to recommend them except the dusky reds, greens, and browns of a rural setting located somewhere in Guatemala near a volcano. When I heard about the volcano, I got excited, but the volcano is a dud. At its most active, it's a slope of black ashes from which rise piddling whiffs of white smoke or steam. Nothing to worry about. No drama there, or comedy, but some unexplained mystic forces maybe.
Debut director Jayro Bustamante focuses on a young woman with a classical pre-Columbian profile as immortalized in pottery and paint. The first time you see her face you think, wow, finally, the icon will come to life, speak, and reveal a representative Guatemalan or Kaqchikel subjectivity. No such luck. The young woman, whose coming-of-age story this is, responds limply to every force she comes in contact with. Dominating her life is her mother, who keeps house and cares for the pigs and chickens, while her father is in the field picking coffee beans off branches.
The young woman doesn't want to marry the nice man they have picked out for her; she prefers the cute guy her own age whose plan is to escape this precarious, feudal lifestyle and try his luck in the U.S. It doesn't end well, but it doesn't end badly, considering where it starts. She gets pregnant, she loses the baby, she ends up marrying a third guy who's willing to take on a wife less than virginal. It's all very depressingly patriarchal. The high point involves snakes in a field, who maliciously, in the time-honored way of snakes, render an already hard life impossible.
We never get to see these snakes. After a brief glimpse of a glossy blur slithering under a leaf, it's back to the humans, shot from the ankles up, or the waist up, as they traipse around the field in a sacred ritual designed to clear out the snakes by propitiating them, or fooling them, or emotional blackmailing them. Since her boyfriend knocked her up, our heroine might have special powers, so it's up to her to save her family by walking barefoot on this barren ground. She doesn't get far before one of the snakes bites her.
So then it's a mad scrabble to penetrate modern civilization long enough to get to a hospital and save her life but lose the baby, who becomes something of a McGuffin, stirring up a showdown between the mother and social services which goes nowhere, thus demonstrating the uselessness of bureaucracy, that post-colonial relic of European evil. This minor plot wrinkle seems intended to inject a jolt of relevance after neither the volcano nor the snakes pan out, but it's too little too late and basically beside the point.
The point is to watch mother and daughter walk along a winding road balancing a load of firewood on their heads in such a stately progress you have plenty of time to wonder how much the wood weighs, how they manage to bundle it so neatly, why it stays put on that fabric disc on top of their heads, and the unlikelihood of such a practical technique ever catching on in a modern urban setting. The point is to listen to the guttural rasping of indigenous tongues and accept the impassable barrier between their lives and those of city dwellers. The point is that pigs, literally, like to get drunk and have sex.