Mark Reviews Movies: DOS ESTACIONES

Dos Estaciones, The Cinema Guild

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 8, 2022

Our protagonist in Dos Estaciones is a woman of few words. María García (Teresa Sánchez) keeps things close to her chest, and by the end of co-writer/director Juan Pablo González's too-restrained drama, we have seen little of and learned even less about this character.

As for the facts of the setup, she runs a tequila company somewhere in Mexico, where her rivals, once locally owned and operated manufacturers, are now primarily American business interests. She's losing financially to them. A potentially devastating blight might have contaminated her agave harvest. The company is in debt, so María can't even pay her employees their full wages anymore.

That's where this story and this character begin, and for all of the suggestions of internal conflict and a whirlwind of emotions beneath surface, that's also where our understanding of María ends. To be sure, Sánchez's performance embodies a sense of controlled stillness as a woman who has learned and perfected maintaining a stone face, a curt manner, and an air of distance during the course of her decades in business.

We keep waiting for something more from María. While the screenplay (written by the director, Ana Isabel Fernández, and Ilana Coleman) certainly doesn't promise too much in that regard, the little cracks in the character's tough façade, provided so precisely by the actor, certainly hint at a cauldron of repression bubbling inside María.

We see it, for example, when she's talking to or simply looking at Rafaela (Rafaela Fuentes), a woman who recently moved to the area after being laid off by another struggling tequila manufacturer. She knows the ins and outs of the day-to-day operation of such an enterprise, so María hires her to help. The way the owner looks at her new employee, though, says how much she wants to say to Rafaela that has nothing to do with business and everything to do with something more personal—far more intimate.

That's about it, though, save for María's occasional tendency toward anger or, at least, the sort of passive-aggressiveness that hints at plenty of rage beneath her calm exterior. The plot, such as it is, has things becoming worse for the company, and even the filmmakers seem unconvinced by this gradual descent into inevitable failure. A couple sections of the movie abandon María to follow residents—primarily a hairdresser (played by Tatín Vera)—of the nearby town, showing us how vital María has been to the area's success but, since that plot thread is a dead end, finding no real narrative or thematic purpose beyond that notion.

The whole of María's character and story feel almost as inconsequential, if only because she remains such an obvious mystery and there's little to expect but doom. The limited scope and one-note main character of Dos Estaciones mean the movie is constantly balancing between restraint and constraint, but in the end, it feels like the latter.

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