Dos Estaciones (Movie)

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    ‘Dos Estaciones’ Review: A Tequila Factory’s Story, Sip by Sip

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    A woman tries to keep her family business running in this film that employs dreamlike rhythms and documentary-style realism.There is a startling moment in the soulful Mexican drama “Dos Estaciones” when it shifts from the protagonist to a secondary character. Movies often take detours, yet when they pop into a supporting player’s life or nose around the story’s periphery, it’s usually to expand on the main event. Here, though, the diversion is so imbued by the secondary character’s being, so organic and leisurely, that it feels like the beginning of another movie entirely.I’ve thought a lot about this detour the two times that I’ve watched “Dos Estaciones.” The story centers on María (Teresa Sánchez), who owns a failing tequila factory in Jalisco, Mexico. It takes a while to get a handle on her. She’s stolid, stoic and somewhat ambiguous — from a distance, she could pass for a man — and the writer-director Juan Pablo González doesn’t proffer chunks of explanation. You have to piece María together from where her gaze lands, how she walks, holds her head and stands next to others. You also have to listen to what she says and to the heaviness of her silences.The story tracks María through her day-to-day at the factory, which once belonged to her father. It’s a bright, spacious facility filled with gleaming modern equipment but no longer has enough workers to make it buzz. The reasons for its decline emerge piecemeal throughout the movie in worried references to a disease that’s affecting the agave, in the stack of unpaid bills in María’s office and, crucially, in references to foreign competitors who are threatening her patrimony. When she curses about “gringos” under her breath, it feels personal: González’s family runs the factory used in the movie.Things happen, quietly, and with scrupulous precision, and María’s life slowly fills in. Her truck doesn’t start; she samples tequila; confers with her employees. She’s habitually by herself, or almost — oftentimes some workers bustle nearby. At one point, she goes to a small party where she meets a friendly young woman, Rafaela (Rafaela Fuentes, one of several nonprofessional actors in the cast). Rafaela once worked in another tequila factory and is now looking for work. As the women chat, sliding into a natural, sympathetic vibe, María furtively looks at Rafaela and then offers her a job.As is true throughout the movie, nothing goes as expected. González has made a handful of documentaries, mostly shorts; I imagine that he’s watched his share of art films. The rhythms in “Dos Estaciones” are somewhat slower than those in contemporary industrial cinema, but the movie never drags, and González doesn’t indulge in excessive longueurs or pointless ambiguities. His most notable strategy (aesthetic and political) is to soften the line between fiction and nonfiction, incorporating documentary-style passages into the fiction that enrich its sense of place and of a people — its realism.The first scene is exemplary in this respect. It opens in a field of mature blue agave plants under a vivid blue sky where a man is using a shovel to shave off the large spiky leaves, exposing the heart of the plant, called the piña (Spanish for pineapple). It’s a mesmerizing interlude, partly because the man’s gestures are so exacting and relatively unfamiliar but also because the light and high-contrast colors are beautiful. If this were a different movie, say, a straight documentary, you might expect some exegesis to come next — cue the voice-over — but the scene has the quality of a dream, and it’s inviting.In time, the piñas are tossed into baskets carried by mules, loaded onto trucks and driven to the factory. There, they’re baked in enormous ovens and subsequently fermented, distilled and cask-aged under María’s direction. It can take up to 20 years to make tequila, an artisanal process that González reveals incrementally over the course of the movie. If he gives it so much attention, it’s partly because the manufacturing, in its quotidian textures and difficult work, offers a window onto María herself. With its modest means, painstaking labor and aggressive, industrial competition, it also mirrors this kind of independent artistic cinema.At once specific and expansive, “Dos Estaciones” can be described several ways: as a drama, a character study, a meditative exploration of the ravages of globalization. At the same time, part of the movie’s pleasure is how it avoids facile categorization, like when it takes that detour I mentioned earlier to follow María’s hairdresser, a trans woman, Tatín (Tatín Vera), as she goes out on the town, enjoys a one-night stand, talks about art and later goes shopping. As Tatín shops, she hails townspeople, and you grasp that these streets and this scene — along with the agave, the blazing sun and the rich red earth — describe, better than any genre label could, María, her world and this striking movie.Dos EstacionesNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Father Doesn’t Know Best at New Directors/New Films

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      Returning to an in-person event, this year’s adventurous festival is filled with discoveries that use families to explore contemporary life.In a springy sign of optimism — illusionary or otherwise! — this year’s New Directors/New Films is returning to theaters full throttle. New York’s Covid numbers are creeping up again, but the festival, a joint venture of Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, has ditched the virtual for the physical. So, if you would like to check out the selections at the 51st edition, which runs through May 1, you will need to do so in person. And while masks are not required, they are recommended by the organizers.From its inception, New Directors has focused on younger or at least less-established filmmakers, many grappling with social and political issues. In a bad year, that means the event is little more than a grab bag of nice tries and misses. In a good year, though — and this is one — the event can feel like the unrulier, at times more adventurous younger sibling of the New York Film Festival. The strength of this year’s lineup is heralded by the strong opening-night selection, Audrey Diwan’s “Happening,” a gutsy, smart, involving French drama about a college student’s agonizing effort to secure an abortion in 1963, when the procedure was illegal. I’ll have more to say about the movie when it opens May 6.As usual, most of the slate has been culled from other festivals, including a half-dozen standouts from Sundance. Among these is Nikyatu Jusu’s “Nanny,” about a young Senegalese woman working for a white Manhattan family with an adorable daughter and the kind of nice, agonizingly polite, broadly smiling parents who, if they were any weirder, could have featured roles in a sequel to “Get Out.” With firm directorial control, an expressionistic palette and a transfixing lead turn from Anna Diop, “Nanny” shrewdly draws from African folklore and old-school Hollywood horror freak-outs to tell an emotionally engaging, up-to-the-second story of class, gender and race — which means it’s also about power.A scene from “Nanny,” which borrows from African folklore and Hollywood horror alike.Blumhouse ProductionsUnlike “Nanny,” most of the selections lack American distribution. That may change, of course, though it’s doubtful that most will secure a theatrical release given the fragile condition of foreign-language distribution in the United States. That makes an event like New Directors all the more necessary, and also gives it an air of quiet urgency. To that end, try to see Laurynas Bareisa’s “Pilgrims,” an eerie, impeccably controlled Lithuanian nail-biter about a man and woman revisiting the horrific murder of a beloved. As they retrace the crime, doggedly uprooting the past, exploring darkened cellars and confronting unwelcome bright faces, they exorcise personal demons, and the long shadow of World War II closes in on them.Another must-see is Sierra Pettengill’s “Riotsville, USA,” a mesmerizing documentary essay that tracks American anti-Black racism through a wealth of disturbing, at times super-freaky 1960s archival footage. The title refers to several strange Potemkin-like towns that the United States military constructed in the wake of the civil unrest of the era. There, against rows of cardboard storefronts with generic names, military personnel — some in uniform, others in civilian clothing — engaged in pantomimes of violence, exercises that were observed by local politicians who took lessons from these war games back to the home front. As the Johnson administration publicly grappled with the fires at home, including with the Kerner Commission that investigated the roots of the unrest, it was also stoking future conflagrations.There are predictable letdowns, too, notably “The Innocents,” from Eskil Vogt, who’s best known for the scripts that he’s written with Joachim Trier, including “The Worst Person in the World.” In theme and spooky vibe, “The Innocents” skews closer to one of their earlier collaborations, “Thelma,” about a woman with telekinetic powers. Set in a sinister, isolated housing complex next to one of those forests where the wind always blows ominously through the trees, “The Innocents” — the title seems to nod at the 1961 psychological horror film with Deborah Kerr — tracks the very, very bad things that happen to several children. The results are unnerving, pristinely crafted and altogether unpleasant.The documentary “Riotsville, USA” looks at “towns” the military built in the 1960s to stage exercises in the wake of civil unrest.CineticLike “Nanny,” some of the most memorable selections in New Directors use families to explore a constellation of ideas about contemporary life, its pressures and thorny complexities. In movies as distinct as “Father’s Day” (from Rwanda), “The Cathedral” (the United States) and “Shankar’s Fairies” (India), the family is at once an intimate unit and a microcosm of larger cultural and social relationships. An appreciable number of titles in the program are female-driven and, not coincidentally, patriarchy also looms — openly and otherwise — as a means of domestic control, as an arm of the state, as a virulent presence or as a structuring absence. Whatever the case, father definitely doesn’t know best.One of the most exciting discoveries, Kivu Ruhorahoza’s “Father’s Day” knits together three loosely connected stories that explore the anguished toll of historical and generational traumas. In one story, a hollow-eyed masseuse mourns the abrupt, outwardly random death of her son and the loss of her business to the pandemic as her wastrel husband dreams and schemes. Elsewhere a daughter takes painful stock of her dying father and his hold on her. In the brutal third story, a petty thief cruelly schools his young son (and be warned, some of these scenes can be difficult to watch). An unspoken malignancy, genocide haunts this movie, and while men trouble the present, women — hopefully, movingly — look to the future.Ricky D’Ambrose’s slow-boiling, visually striking drama “The Cathedral” tracks the coming-of-age of a boy — played by separate actors — who grows up in a lower-middle-class family that gradually falls apart year by year, one loss and disappointment at a time. Beginning in the 1980s, the story charts the family’s bleak disintegration through a series of precisely framed and staged chronological scenes in which nothing much seems to happen or everything does. With uninflected acting, explosions of fatherly violence and occasional nods at the outside world (the gulf war, a Kodak commercial), D’Ambrose brings together the personal and the political with lacerating cool and a boldly deployed anti-aesthetic.“Shankar’s Fairies” focuses on the daughter (Shreeja Mishra) of a wealthy family in 1960s India.Asian ShadowsBy vivid contrast, Irfana Majumdar’s quietly piercing drama, “Shankar’s Fairies,” uses beauty to sharp critical effect. Set inside the lush grounds of a sprawling estate in India, the story centers on the daughter of a wealthy family and one of its many servants. As news of the 1962 Sino-Indian war periodically drifts in, the movie charts the bonds and radically unequal lives of this child, with her British school and manners, and of her loyal, exploited caretaker. With scant exposition, flashes of breathtaking cruelty and banal moments bristling with meaning — a servant cuts the crusts off white-bread sandwiches while listening to Prime Minister Nehru on the radio — Majumdar takes measure of colonialism and neocolonialism alike.The tonally and visually distinct “Dos Estaciones” and “Robe of Gems” both take place in a contemporary Mexico consumed by violence. In “Dos Estaciones,” the director Juan Pablo González tethers the travails of the owner of an artisanal tequila factory to the ferocity of global capitalism: Her family’s legacy and her future are existentially imperiled by foreign competitors. In “Robe of Gems,” the director Natalia López Gallardo focuses on women from different classes whose lives are undone by shocks of barbarism, mostly domestic. Gallardo is too indebted to some of her art-cinema influences, Carlos Reygadas included. But she — like a number of this year’s other new and newish directors — is nonetheless a talent to watch.New Directors/New Films runs Wednesday through May 1. Go to newdirectors.org for more information. More

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      Sundance Wrap-Up: 6 Movies We Like and One We Disagree on

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      Even virtual, the festival gave our chief film critics a lot to talk about.For the second year in a row, the Sundance Film Festival canceled its in-person plans and went virtual, wrapping up on Sunday evening. It was quite a feast, with more than 80 documentary and narrative features. Here are six our chief film critics especially liked, and one they disagree about.Manohla Dargis‘All That Breathes’Directed by Shaunak Sen, “All That Breathes” is an immersive, haunting documentary portrait of two Muslim brothers in New Delhi who have dedicated their lives to rescuing birds, many affected by humans and climate change. With intimacy, a great score and some fantastic macro cinematography — the birds loom large here — the movie pays tribute to the brothers even as it underscores that individuals alone can’t save nature.At times, Sen’s emphasis on visual lyricism over information opens up unanswered questions. And while he draws attention to anti-Muslim sentiments, it is never clear how Sen would like viewers to connect these terrifying threats with the grim specter of species extinction. Even so, there is no denying the movie’s power or its subject; there’s also no denying the heartbreak of its images. The raptors perched on mountains of garbage, the monkeys navigating overhead tangles of wires, the solitary turtle struggling to ascend a mound of debris — in the story of interspecies coexistence, the animals have already lost.‘Descendant’Emmett Lewis in “Descendant,” about the discovery of the last recorded American slave ship.Participant, via Sundance InstituteIn her latest documentary, Margaret Brown tells the story that begins — though doesn’t end — with the discovery of the Clotilda, the last recorded American slave ship. In 1860, decades after the importation of enslaved peoples had been made illegal in the United States, the ship sailed to Alabama. The men who owned and operated the Clotilda arrived at night and, after bringing their captives ashore, torched the ship to hide their crime. The ship sunk, disappearing from view.Brown tracks the fascinating efforts to recover the Clotilda, but her truer, more vivid subjects are those who survived slavery. Some helped establish Africatown, a community north of Mobile where much of the documentary takes place. There, Brown visits with descendants, people for whom slavery isn’t an abstraction but a living memory that generations have carefully preserved and passed down. The movie loses some of its focus midway, but the story of the Clotilda and where Brown takes this documentary are very moving.‘Dos Estaciones’Teresa Sánchez plays the owner of a tequila factory in “Dos Estaciones.”Gerardo Guerra, via Sundance InstituteFor much of this elliptical, visually arresting Mexican drama, María García (Teresa Sánchez), a stolid and stoic loner, holds the center. María, a monument to an old-fashioned way of life, if one who presents as nonbinary, owns the Jalisco tequila factory that gives the movie its title. But times are tough: a fungus is ruining the agave crops, and foreign-owned companies pose a threat to artisanal producers like María, who’s alone physically and existentially.The director Juan Pablo González immediately grounds you in María’s life both with the seductive, velvety beauty of the cinematography and by focusing on the material conditions of her everyday life, including the mesmerizing, labor-intensive production of tequila, which you follow from field to bottle. At one point, romance looms, and for a time the story shifts to a hairdresser, Tatín (Tatín Vera) a transgender woman, who with María, and several other characters, creates a vivid, textured, altogether unexpected world.A.O. Scott‘Leonor Will Never Die’Sheila Francisco plays a local filmmaker coming out of retirement.Carlos Mauricio, via Sundance InstituteThe titular heroine of this wonderfully unclassifiable movie — played by the Filipino singer and theater actress Sheila Francisco — is a sweet-natured, absent-minded woman of around 70. She lives (and frequently squabbles) with her grown son, stays on (mostly) friendly terms with her former husband and is haunted by the memory of her other son’s death. She is also a locally renowned action filmmaker, whose complicated emergence from retirement frames the director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s heartfelt, zany tribute to the magic of movies and the power of love.Leonor’s final script becomes a movie within the movie, but Ramirez Escobar’s metacinematic shenanigans don’t stop there. I counted at least four distinct layers of reality in “Leonor Will Never Die,” but there might be more. In any case the fun lies in the ways they collide and overlap. This may sound like a too-clever postmodern genre mash-up, but somehow the combination of family melodrama, pulpy violence and surreal comedy add up to the disarmingly tender portrait of an artist on the edge of the afterlife.‘A House Made of Splinters’Children in a temporary shelter in Ukraine, in the documentary “A House Made of Splinters.”via Sundance InstituteThe reality that Simon Lereng Wilmont’s documentary explores is almost unbearably heartbreaking. In Lysychansk, in eastern Ukraine, an institution provides temporary shelter for children whose lives have been disrupted by alcoholism, domestic violence and unemployment, social problems that war with Russia has made worse. The children find safety and companionship with one another and an endlessly patient staff while waiting to return to their parents or, more likely, to be transferred to orphanages or foster care.Granted extraordinary access to his subjects, Wilmont proceeds with exemplary tact and sensitivity, weaving a heartbreaking tapestry that also glows with empathy and even shows glimmers of mischief and delight. To be reminded of the vulnerability of young bodies and souls is wrenching, but there is also something thrilling about the honesty and tenacity of the kids and the dedication of their caretakers. It’s as if a Frederick Wiseman film had been reimagined by William Blake.‘Marte Um (Mars One)’Cícero Lucas in a scene from “Marte Um (Mars One).”Leonardo Feliciano, via Sundance InstituteThis Brazilian charmer isn’t especially flashy, buzzy or provocative. It’s a gentle, closely observed family drama, shot in warm colors in Contagem, a city in the state of Minas Gerais. The main characters — Wellington (Carlos Francisco), Tercia (Rejane Faria) and their children, Eunice (Camilla Damião) and Deivinho (Cícero Lucas) — each contend with crises that test their individual sense of identity and their bonds with one another.Unfolding in the wake of Jair Bolsonaro’s election to Brazil’s presidency in 2018, their stories brush against social and political sore spots (involving race, work, sexuality and religion) that will hardly seem foreign to North American audiences. But “Marte Um,” beautifully directed by Gabriel Martins, isn’t a culture-war polemic or an ideological fable. It’s a stirring example of — and a passionate argument for — the kind of humane realism that keeps movies alive, and that never goes out of style.Dargis vs. Scott‘Sharp Stick’Kristine Froseth plays a naive Angeleno opposite Jon Bernthal’s married man in “Sharp Stick.”via Sundance InstituteDargis I was looking forward to Lena Dunham’s “Sharp Stick,” about the sexual coming-of-age of Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), a woman in her mid-20s. But the only thing that kept me watching is Dunham; if anyone else had directed it, I would have bailed.There’s no point in enumerating all the reasons I dislike it — OK, the unfunny Los Angeles stereotypes were exasperating. But my biggest issue was the cloying and childlike Sarah Jo, whose narratively expedient naïveté worked my last frayed nerve. When I wasn’t overwhelmed with irritation, I did appreciate that Dunham has revisited the vexing, oft-troubling figure of the desiring, desirable young woman, a character that evokes Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll and so on.Scott My position in arguments about Lena Dunham is always “yes, but.” Yes, Sarah Jo’s unworldliness is overstated, some aspects of her sexual awakening seem like wishful thinking, and the tonal shifts from silly to sexy to earnest to icky can be a lot. But “Sharp Stick” is interesting to think about partly because Dunham herself is thinking, rather than (as so many of her Sundance peers and followers have done) recycling clichés about lust, female empowerment and family dysfunction. The unstable, scattershot quality of this movie is to me evidence of her curiosity and a willingness to push out of her own comfort zone, if she even has one. More