Despite officially having made a marriage match, Maria consorts with Pepe (Marvin
Other workers, pissing away their wages at the plantation's bar, dish more frankly about life up north. “White people will treat you like shit,” one says. Another laughs: “No, they have their negroes for that.”
Maria, like Bustamante, has more pressing, practical concerns than what goes on in the U.S. Her groom-to-be isn't especially interested in her, and he darts off to “the city” as soon as Maria's parents have killed him a pig for an engagement feast and paraded virginal Maria before him in a ceremonial headdress. (Both pig-killing and headdress-donning are presented in painstaking detail.) Meanwhile, she and her parents toil at a plantation at the foot of a volcano in the Guatemalan highlands, their labor and lives unfolding in compositions as static and rich as still lifes. Bustamante worked closely on the film with real Mayan farmers, and he's so attentive to their techniques and rituals — their
That scene, though, is a wonder, a complex split-screen seduction that moves, in one shot, from
After that betrayal, Bustamante stages more of the arresting observational tableaux that define the film's early reels. But they're now made tense by plot: What viewer doesn't know that, eventually, Pepe will abscond to the United States without her, or that Maria's mother will regard her swelling belly and say something along the lines of, “Why didn't you count your moons?”
But even as it verges on melodrama, Ixcanul remains fascinated by its people's practical thinking, by how their contemporary circumstances — and occasionally pre-modern beliefs — lead to actions both relatable and achingly, disastrously not.
Ixcanul
Starring Maria Mercedes Coroy, Maria Telón, Manuel Antún, Justo Lorenzo, and Marvin Coroy. Written and directed by Jayro Bustamante. 91 minutes. Not rated. Opens Friday, October 14 at Living Room Theaters FAU, 777 Glades Rd., Boca Raton; 561-549-2600; fau.livingroomtheaters.com; and on Friday, October 21, at Stonzek Theatre at the Lake Worth Playhouse, 713 Lave Ave., Lake Worth; 561-586-6410; lakeworthplayhouse.org.