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PRAYERS FOR THE STOLEN
Director: Tatiana Huezo Cast: Marya Membreño, Mayra Batalla, Ana Cristina Ordóñez González, Giselle Barrera Sánchez, Blanca Itzel Pérez, Alejandra Camacho, Camila Gaal, Norma Pablo, Memo Villegas, Julián Guzmán Girón MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:50 Release Date: 11/17/21 (limited; Netflix) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 16, 2021 Kids can sense when something is wrong, even they don't understand the specifics of a situation. That's similar to the sense we get from the opening scene of Prayers for the Stolen, in which a young girl and her mother vigorously dig a hole in the dirt with their hands. With the work complete, the mother tells her daughter to lie down in the ditch they have fashioned. It's the perfect length for the girl, ensuring that she's beneath the ground from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. We don't know why the two have done this. We have no idea if this is a game or something more severe. All we know is that the girl looks as if she's lying in a shallow grave, and that, perhaps, is the only thing writer/director Tatiana Huezo needs to imply for us to know—deep down, in some primal part of our brain—that something is definitely wrong. The story here, set in a rural village somewhere amidst the mountains in Mexico, revolves around the girl, her mother, her friends, and, to one degree or another, everyone in this town. They live ordinary lives, filled with routine. Some of the men and boys work at a local mine on the side of a mountain, and every so often, the peace and quiet of the village is interrupted by a massive explosion and a plume of smoke and rock dust. Some of the women and girl work in nearby poppy fields, tending to the flowers and extracting the juice from their buds. The kids who don't work—such as 8-year-old Ana (Ana Cristina Ordóñez Gonazález), the girl who had been hiding in the hole in the ground—go to the one-classroom school in the village. That's not necessarily a routine. The school isn't a constant, because teachers come and go with some frequency, and the instructor at the start of this story is planning to leave soon. Nobody else, he informs the parents, will be replacing him. No one wants to work here, and sure enough, five years later when we meet again with a teenaged Ana (Marya Membreño), she and her friends are in class with kids who are as old as they were the last time they attended school. Time is a noticeable element of Huezo's storytelling here—how it moves with relaxation, how it passes almost without our notice in the film's biggest narrative jump, how it eventually rushes with inescapable speed toward some inevitable tragedy for our protagonist. Ana and her mother Rita (Mayra Batalla), raising the girl on her own with unapologetic toughness (Ana's father migrated to the United States for work, but he hasn't been sending money), have been preparing for that moment, which is more a probability than a possibility in this place. For all of the violence the two hear and all of the consequences they see, there's no preparing for this reality. Ana lives in a region controlled by a drug cartel. As children, she and her best friends, Maria (played by Blanca Itzel Pérez as a child and by Giselle Barrera Sánchez as a teen) and Paula (played by Camila Gaal as a child and Alejandra Camacho as a teen), know that something isn't quite right. Trucks will drive into the area on occasion, and Ana, who has been taught by her mother to listen to and be aware of her surroundings, might hear fighting or gunfire in the distance. Such an instance is the last she knows of that teacher. A classmate disappears suddenly, and the girl's mother, whom Ana sees covered in blood and sobbing that night, soon goes away, too. Rita says the family simply moved, but Ana is smart enough to know that people don't leave their possessions behind when they move. She's too naïve, since she is only 8, to realize what truth she has uncovered in noting that. The story, adapted from Jennifer Clement's novel, exists right on the edge and verge of such knowledge, and the film, Huezo's first narrative work after a career of making documentaries, lives in that fragile place between the innocence of not knowing and the absolute horror of realization. There's a bittersweet quality to the story at the start, as Ana and her friends play and hang out like ordinary kids—even though we know they're playing clean-up in a house previously occupied by a man who was likely murdered by the cartel. Almost immediately after the film's sudden forward movement in time (The two sets of actors playing the youngsters are so perfectly cast that we might believe Huezo simply waited several years to complete the second half of the story), only that bitter tone remains. Maria, born with a cleft palate, is about to undergo corrective surgery, when a new cartel—with more trucks, guns, and members—drives through town, leaving the soldiers meant to protect the clinic to take cover. Help isn't coming. The teenage girls still spend time together and talk about the new teacher on whom they have a collective crush. Even so, the interruptions to that ordinary life—the cartels, helicopters raining pesticide without care for anyone below, more disappearances and killings—become more frequent and too close for the now mature Ana to dismiss them as anything but a threat to her neighbors, her friends, her mother, and herself. Huezo simply observes, although with a keen awareness of how to replicate Ana's own experience and growth by way of what we see and don't see. Prayers for the Stolen is a somber and sobering reflection on innocence deprived. Copyright © 2021 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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