Reviewed by David Levinson

OPENING with a pretty ordinary-looking house suspended in darkness, Maria Full of Grace hardly skips a beat before the titular lady is thrown headfirst – within a matter of minutes – from a muted familial goodbye into the throngs of factorywork. Taken from a literal grab-bag, it's an open-air endorsement of Marson's considerable control over material that could've easily ended up in the junkyard for films about socioeconomic underachievers: he tends to keep things both narratively and emotionally concise, trafficking in several time leaps to get to the destination, and deflecting almost all of its turmoil onto the hard, matter-of-fact greys that accompany the bus ride. And, perhaps most importantly, he ditches context.


Because context is the enemy of political filmmaking. The more monochromatic, sluggish, and broad a political view, the more likely characters are to start acting like dispensers. The Motorcycle Diaries was the most recent offender, every clean-cut shot and edit wearing away at a revolutionary until nothing was left but a monument to middlebrow-dom. It also made a point of fetishizing the poor, turning Guevara's cross-country trek into a series of handjobs for the self-appointed liberals among the audience. Maria Full of Grace, on the other hand, feels caught in the ether between two familiar tropes: a steely-willed girl rallying against a) oppressive family conditions, and b) oppressive social conditions. In drawing up some of the narrative architecture, Marson is a little over-reliant on a), unleashing a Real Big, Fat Colombian Women Have Curves-esque tide of egos butting across generational platforms. However, things do start to become interesting once we move onto b): for one, I don't believe that this film could be based on a tagline-touted "1000 true stories" because I don't believe that 1000 girls like Maria exist. She is a singular, burning light, one that basically kicks the ass of every other doe-eyed 'victim of circumstance' in existence. And she's also the gatekeeper to the film's success: at once maternal, cocky, self-conscious and retentive, her constant, unreadable presence cancels out any possibility that she is being forced into moving units against her will. Family need may be the first step, but pretty soon it becomes about the thrill of growing out of yourself, which is why Maria seems so galled that Blanca decides to crash her party.

The maturation process picks up in velocity once the film makes the move to New York. Bridging the change in location is a finely-tuned-to-breaking-point plane sequence, in which one of the mules falls sick, sending a three-man chorus of barely co-ordinated half-whispers and nervous glances rippling through the cabin. All the while, intensifying things is how ridiculously young they each seem, Blanca painted up like a Meyer vixen that didn't quite make the cut, Lucy left strung-out and hung-to-dry, and even Maria barely holding it together underneath that gaunt exterior. New York doesn't quite come as the safety net imagined – it's both gaping and claustrophobic, at times feeling like a Sesame Street Xerox, with its huddle of crayoned brick tenements that scream "community" but are capped by chalky skies, matresses on a living-room floor, and the sound of police sirens dimly wailing at night. It's the same sort of tension that arises when, say, news regarding the discovery of Lucy's corpse is delivered by a weathered bear of a man, with a lop-sided face and manner you could soak into. And while the after-effects may seem a little banally moralizing on paper, the stakes are raised by the pure emotional combustion it incites, Maria's confessional tiptoeing being mistaken for a betrayal that causes Lucy's sister to hold nothing back, in both initial outburst and eventual reconciliation. But it all feels like lead-up to the gorgeous final shot, a slender solo track of Maria through an airport lounge, as she turns her back on Blanca and, in turn, Colombia. It's groggy, ostentatious, and unabashedly cinematic, signaling both a closing-off and simultaneous opening-up to something so much more.