Venice film festival review: The Burning Plain

3 / 5 stars
No disgrace, but Arriaga is not up to Iñárritu's level

The Burning Plain follows a similar pattern for the screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga who helped kickstart the Mexican cinema renaissance, having penned Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel (all directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu) as well as Tommy Lee Jones's directorial debut, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

Arriaga's work is characterised by complicated timeshift narratives, ambitiously semi-mystical themes, and a predilection for neatly linking seemingly-disparate story elements into a tight-knit dramatic whole.

Now he has gone it alone having fallen out with Iñárritu. The Burning Plain is set in the same cross-border Tex-Mex turf as Three Burials but dispenses with such gruesome devices as a decaying corpse, and focuses on a group of damaged individuals.

Restaurant owner Sylvia (Charlize Theron) is joylessly sleeping with one random man after another. Mexican teen Santiago (JD Pardo) learns that his adulterous father has been killed with the woman he was having an affair with. Dissatisfied housewife Gina (Kim Basinger) has to conceal her errant behaviour from her family.

To even suggest how these people connect would dismantle Arriaga's narrative, but it's safe to reveal the presiding, linking event : an explosion that guts a trailer miles out in the desert. As events unwind, Arriaga's script moves backwards and forwards in time, crossing generations and frontiers at will.

The identities and motivations of Arriaga's characters are designed to put the audience through the emotional wringer, and his actors do a good job in managing the demanding twists of the script's complex juggling act.

But Arriaga resorts far to often to hack soap opera tricks to move things along: studied glares, can-I-have-a-word-with-yous, implausible behaviour tics. And if the story was told in a linear fashion, it would be a pretty unremarkable string of punishingly melodramatic events.

But how does Arriaga do as a director? The truth is he has a long way to go before he can match Iñárritu's cinematic panache. There's nothing here to compare with Iñárritu's spectacular set-pieces, such as the opening 10 minutes of Amores Perros, or the gunshot sequence in Babel.

Arriaga has not disgraced himself; thanks to his writing, there's an underlying strength that means his film remains engrossing. But it doesn't feel like he's got much new to say; it feels like a step backwards.