Maria Full of Grace
Posted to www.marxmail.org on August 7, 2004
The 1989 British TV miniseries "Traffik"
showed how the tentacles of the heroin trade reached both upwards and
downwards, to rich and poor alike. One of the main characters was an
impoverished opium farmer in Pakistan,
who is forced into becoming a low-level employee of a trafficker after the army
destroys his crops in an anti-drug sweep. When Steven Soderbergh
remade the film as "Traffic" in 2000 and relocated it in the Mexican
drug trade, he dispensed with all of the economically marginal characters who
made the British film so compelling in class terms.
Writer-director Joshua Marston's
"Maria Full of Grace," now showing in New York
theaters, turns "Traffic" upside down. Dispensing completely with
wealthy or powerful characters, either in the drug trade or in law enforcement,
it focuses on lowly "mules." At the low end of business, this is the
easiest way to avoid detection. Desperately poor Colombians are enticed into
swallowing dozens of heroin pellets wrapped in condoms in exchange for a few
thousand dollars. A promise of such a small fortune is worth the risk of a
pellet breaking inside one's stomach and certain death.
Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) is
a pregnant seventeen year old who has a job removing thorns from rose stems in
a suburb of Bogotá. When an attack of morning sickness forces her to ask
permission from the foreman to go to the bathroom, he tells her that she has
already had a break and to continue working. She then throws up on a pile of
roses, which he tells her to clean up and put back on the assembly line. In
this Colombia factory, low wages and indignity go hand in hand. Despite
lacking an alternative, she decides to quit.
Maria's boyfriend is in no position to help out, even if he
loved her. He lives with ten other family members in a small house. But it is
not his meager economic prospects that repel her. Rather it is his limited
horizons on life overall. Early in the film she invites him to climb to the
roof of her family's house so that they can make love in privacy while enjoying
the view. He turns her down, thus symbolizing his own pedestrian nature. She,
on the other hand, scales the walls and surveys the surrounding countryside
with a victorious expression on her face. This is not a woman willing to be
bound by social and familial conventions.
Since her economic prospects are so limited, she becomes a
willing recruit to the drug trade. In a Bogotá saloon, she is introduced to a
local dealer who lays out the job description as if she were applying to be a
nurse or a secretary. They provide the passport, visa and drugs. She flies to New
York City, where she will be greeted by his henchmen
who will retrieve the drugs which by that point will have reached the final
passages of her digestive system. Then and only then will she be paid. If any
of the drugs are stolen, her family will be paid a visit by gang members. This
veiled threat, uttered in a matter-of-fact manner, is emblematic of a film that
has little use for the sort of pyrotechnics that typifies "Traffic", "Scarface" et al. In this film, economic duress rather
than a gun regulates behavior.
Her biggest trial is learning how to swallow the pellets.
Lucy (Guilied Lopez), a veteran of the Bogotá-New
York City connection, trains her with large grapes.
After she has mastered this inhuman task, she is brought to the headquarters of
the drug gang where she is fed more than fifty pellets during a long night.
When she is allowed a meal break, they make sure to put a pellet in a bowl of
soup. In either the Taylorist flower or drug trade,
not a moment is wasted.
When Maria arrives in New York City,
everything goes wrong. After Lucy, Maria and another mule--a fellow flower
factory employee and friend named Blanca (Yenny Paola
Vega)--are brought to a cheap hotel, Lucy becomes
seriously ill from a pellet that has broken in transit. She is then killed by
the two gangsters there to gather up the drugs. Maria and Blanca flee to a
Colombian neighborhood in Queens, where they take refuge
in the cramped apartment of Lucy's sister. The remainder of the film is
involved with their desperate struggle to get a foothold in the United States,
a country that Lucy described to her as "too perfect" when she first
met her. At this point, the film unites drug and
immigration themes in a seamless manner and begins to evoke "El Norte," the memorable story of Guatemalan refugees
trying to make it in Los Angeles.
If Maria has not succeeded in the flower or drug business, surely there will be
some other way for her to make it in the Land
of Plenty. Her prospects for
success remain an open question at the end of this powerfully realistic film.
If she will make it, it will be because of people like Don
Fernando, a character who helps recent immigrants out from his travel agency
office. Don Fernando is played by Orlando Tobon, who
runs a travel agency in Jackson Heights.
The Los Angeles Times (Aug. 4, 2004) reported that Tobon
"often declines to charge customers for his assistance. Lifting the
spirits and chances of Spanish-speaking immigrants, he ladles out suggestions
on where to look for a job, an apartment or an immigration lawyer, or how to respond
to a parking ticket, an eviction notice or even a supervisor's sexual
advances." Local residents call him "the mayor of Little
Colombia." Tobon says, "I sleep well at
night. All my life I do this type of thing for others because my mother taught
me to help people, and even my grandfather was doing this." Ultimately,
this film is about such people rather than sneering gangsters.
Marston is an exceptional talent.
The Village Voice reveals that he wrote the first draft of the script in 48
hours. Marston received a master's degree in
political science at the University
of Chicago before enrolling in the
NYU film school. The Voice reports that "To avoid the clichés of the drug
thriller and give the material an emotional reality, he spent the next two years
researching drug mules and Colombian daily life."
The film is produced by Paul Mezey,
who also produced "La Ciudad," another powerful story of Latino
immigrants in New York City. The
work of people like Marston and Mezey
is a credit to the idealism of many people working in independent film today.
"Maria Full of Grace" is not to be missed.
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Maria Full of Grace website: http://www.mariafullofgrace.com/main.html
Review of Traffik/Traffic: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/traffic.htm
Review of La Ciudad: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/La_Ciudad.htm