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"The Burning Plain." The boundary of solitude The mist

The Argentine G. Arriaga, who directed this film, he was also writer of "21 grams "and" Babel, "two works that I greatly admired and whose compositional principle is the sudden crossover between substantially different stories, but arises from a marginal (the sale of a gun in Babel) or from the dark past of a character, as in this film. These stories seem to initially proceed on different tracks, but their creator, using calibrated dosing time shifts and the answers to the spectator, leaving traces of the junction, it works, that is, those that Tomashevsky called "compositional reasons" not a particular is inserted at random, but will be useful later in the work. Chekhov on the other hand explained: "If at the beginning of the story says that a nail is driven into the wall at the end the hero will have to hang himself." Here's an example of Arriaga in the film: the funeral of the father of Santiago, burned into the arms of his mistress (Kim Basinger good!) Dispersed in a shack near the border with Mexico, the husband of the adulterous woman brings her four sons than to curse the man who took away his wife. Only the eldest daughter, when he is in front of Santiago, seems to want to stop for a moment more. We understand that's when something will blossom between the two. It is a relationship that is born too soon, through which she tries unsuccessfully to get rid of the immense burden of a gesture, accidental but fatal, made just against the mother. Some years after this event (to interpret it now Charlize Theron), is still trying to find a balance in charge of a nice restaurant, and various adventures with men other than the surface only bring chaos and death wish. We see it on a high rock wall, as in a painting by Friedrich, on the threshold of suicide. Then, suddenly, he reappeared from Santiago that she had had a child, but from which he fled in shame of his act. Everything is smooth so demeaning towards a happy ending that is the Achilles heel of this movie. One gets the impression that so simple an epilogue has been imposed to the director, so instead of thinking about the end of the movie, you prefer to return to its development on the edge of loneliness, the waste land that is the soul of some characters, that sense of emptiness that suddenly explodes in their fates as the gas destroys the squalid haven for lovers, but also carries with it the consequences for years