The cut-out protagonist - a 17-year old girl with fiery soul trapped in a poor, pious, and conservative Colombian family living in a generic semi-slum area in Colombia. The kind of area where streets aren't quite dirt roads, but aren't quite paved either. She lives in a house full of women, littered with religious artifacts looking more like Salvation Army rejects than tools of the divine.
She's poor, working a dead-end job de-thorning roses in a factory with an uncaring and unsympathetic boss with a waist far bigger than his heart. She has a small-minded boyfriend who seeded the growing foetus within her. "I don't love you, and you don't love me. But you have a baby and its my duty. Marry me." reasons her boyfriend in spanish. One can't help but snicker at the stereotyped lad.
Maria Alvarez, like any strong willed girl with wordly ideas of her own, vehemently rejects such an offer, and subsequently throws a fajita at him. Instead, she quits her job and becomes a drug mule. Drug mules are people who smuggle drugs into other countries by swallowing as many as 60 latex pellets packed full of drugs at a time. She does this to escape from her physical and financial reality.
Going along on the journey with her is her Best Friend, Blanca, (the fat girl side-kick to the attractive heroine)and another girl, Lucy, who acts as their mentor-of-sorts, though in my opinion they are all in the same sad situation. They're all headed for new york with a belly full of sin.
And so the movie plays out in similar fasion, full of predictable cliches and tired scenarios. Lucy dies in the motel they are held in in New York when a pellet bursts in her stomach. The drug dealers, bored, cold and calculative, cut her stomach open to remove the rest of the drugs before discarding her lifeless body. Maria flees in fear with Blanca in tow, going to the only place they know - the residence of Lucy's sister, who immigrated to NY some time before.
"New York isn't so bad. It was very scary for me at first, but I stayed because of my child," says Lucy's sister while cradling her swelling belly.
"I want to give him opportunities." she adds with a self-satisfied smile.
Pregnant Maria listens intently and behind her saucer-like earnest eyes, her brain races with the possibilities. One can already predict what she is going to do. Surely, she's going to stay in NY. But no, the movie pulls us along as she buys tickets and drags Blanca with her to the airport so they can get onto the next plane back to dead-end poverty.
That is, until Blanca passes immigration. She turns back to see Maria looking at her with a mixture of regret, sorrow but at the same time satisfaction, meekly waving good-bye. Blanca is neither surprised nor angered. Like us, she expected this.
Maria decided to stay in NY as one of the million illegal immigrants who try to eke out a living; hoping for a better future - If not for herself then for her child.
Maria Full of Grace, screened last week at The Arts House, is a beautiful movie where Joshua Marston, scriptwriter and director, exercises great restraint by sidestepping many tempting plot off-shoots, snubbing the "neo-noir" cinema popularized by the Coen brothers so famously in "The Big Lebowski".
Even its tag-line embodies the more traditional story-telling nature of the movie - "The True Story of a Million Lives." The film doesn't fool itself into thinking it's doing anything new, modern or cutting-edge. Joshua Marston realizes and embraces that everything which can be done has been done.
But the thing is - he just does it better.