The Burning Plain

So this Friday night teenage America has been offered two films in which at least one of the principle characters represents their demographic field. Naturally, one of those two is Jennifer’s Body which you don’t need me to tell you about if you live on planet Earth and you’re not Amish. Seriously, I don’t have cable, I don’t subscribe to any major publications and I am rarely in places that would have advertising for this kind of movie and still I am already to the point of oversaturation with Megan Fox’s body plastered all over the entire universe in a desperate ploy to make the young and weak minded associate that Jennifer’s Body and Megan Fox’s body are one and the same. Just a quick visit to Fandango or any supermarket attests to this fact.

Really, I don’t get the point, I don’t understand what the obsession is; why all of anyone under the age of thirty seems so obsessed with a Sasha Grey want-to-be with no talent and not a single title of merit under her belt. Besides, every major movie website has already shown that damn lake scene over and over again enough so that it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone what is going to happen.

It is thus not without some irony that I had to chose between a film in which the actress playing the teenage main character is already twenty-three so that people can justify nude scenes of fantasy teenage girls but still be horrified when they read about cases of adult-pubescent crossover relationships, or I could go see Burning Plain, a film in which our teenage protagonist is, well, a teenager.

Guillermo Arriaga’s Burning Plain starts out very much like all the other of films he has written, although most of them were directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, in which a number of stories begin seemingly unrelated and finished almost entirely interlocked with each other. It is a tried and true method and it is by this point Arriga’s trademark. Guillermo Arriaga’s new story is no exception and it shines primarily because he knows how to tell it so that the climax of each is almost simultaneous, which took me from over an hour and a half of ‘where is this going’ to a blissful realization of the entire story as if it were some kind of divine epiphany. Fair enough that that might be a bit over the top, and I might be a bit thick because I was the only one in the cinema who made an out loud ‘ah’, but for me the entire story coming into light was pleasantly surprising and when all was said and done, it made sense.

All the same, I can not help but complain a little as there were a number of small moments that annoyed me. For example, I always find it strange that one character speaks in one language and another character speaks in a completely different language and the conversation continues onwards as such in a film in a phenomenon I like to call the Star Wars Syndrome. I appreciate that conversations like this exist in Quebec and around my own dinner table but not with total strangers. Most multi-lingual conversations at least begin with ‘excuse me, do you speak…’

Something else that got on my nerves were a few moments in which logic seemed to simply skip the Burning Plain all together. One character drives off in their car and is followed by another character on a bicycle.

Some character development could have been better fleshed out. Again, I can at least appreciate that some of the characters were left a bit ambiguous for the grand finale but there was a lot to be said of each character and they simply don’t get their time in the sun, most notably Joaquim de Almeida, which annoyed me because he is one of the only reasons I even went to see this movie in the first place.

And that brings me to one of the better parts of this film: the acting. Joaquim de Almeida was brilliant for the whole of five minutes he was on the damn screen but made me feel that I got my tickets worth all by himself. I had also forgotten going in that the film stared Charlize Theron, who never ceases to amaze me since the model turned actress is the only one of her kind who actually performs in quality roles as opposed to being a useless bimbo in some Hollywood blockbuster. It turns out that she and Jennifer Lawrence steal the show, and rightfully so because both of them are brilliant.

But what really made Burning Plain shine for me were the moments focusing on the adolescent couple in this movie. While I am sure elsewhere in the city Megan Fox’s interpretation of a teenage school girl is fulfilling the fantasies of many, Jennifer Lawrence and J.D. Padro’s time on screen together felt genuine and even reminded me a little of what it was like to that age with so much uncertainty and the nerve racking experience of one’s first serious encounter with the other sex.

Overall, the film was solid with an ending that sealed the deal for me, which is either because it was well written enough to keep me wondering or because as I said earlier I am extremely thick and only realized at the end what everyone else had much earlier on in the film.

As far as the choice for teenage America, I would suppose that they have made it because I was sadly the youngest person in the entire cinema and my days of being a teenager have long since come and gone.