‘Ashes’ San Sebastian Review: Diego Luna’s Sharp Drama Captures The Joys And Struggles Of Young Migrants Before Sinking Into Misery
Lucila, a Mexican twenty-something, juggles childcare and delivery jobs in Spain while family wounds and her troubled younger brother erode her resilient spirit. The film screens in the Horizontes Latinos section.
Premiering as a special screening at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the latest directorial effort from Diego Luna joins that of his friend, partner and fellow actor Gael García Bernal, whose own debut behind the camera, Hombre al agua, had a similar world premiere in Venice. Of the two, Luna’s is the sturdier, an approach to urban realism that shares some common ground with the Dardenne brothers. Ceniza en la boca is, at heart, a family and migration drama focused on a young Mexican woman trying to survive in Spain.
It all begins in Mexico, where Lucila, then barely a teenager, and her little brother Diego are abandoned by their mother, Isabel (Adriana Paz), who seems to flee the family home in a hurry, bound for parts unknown. Eight years later, Ashes picks up with Lucila, now in her twenties (Anna Díaz, excellent), living in Madrid with her brother (Benny Emmanuel), now 14, and, as we soon learn, with their mother as well. She has since started a new relationship with a woman, and neither sibling seems to get along with the couple.
But the film’s center of gravity is Lucila, who works as a nanny for a woman who treats her terribly, and who meets up in the park with other girls in the same situation, all of them Latin American. There, amid the games of the children in their care, Lucila and her colleagues loosen up and let go, talking freely about sex, men and their (ugly) bosses, and then carry that spirited energy into nights out and parties. But Diego, who is struggling at school, causes trouble with her employer, and soon Lucila no longer earns enough to get by.
That’s not even the worst of it: she can’t stand her mother, and when her best friend leaves to work in Barcelona, she decides to pack a bag and follow. The director stays with her on this new path, which brings a boyfriend (to whom she lies about her work, which in Barcelona includes caring for an elderly woman as well as delivering for Glovo), new friends, and the same blend of lively, youthful spirit and a reality that slowly wears her down. When Diego turns up in Barcelona to visit, things get a little more complicated, and there is less and less left of Lucila’s open, easy laughter.
For two-thirds of the film, Luna, with a notable contribution from Mexico City–born cinematographer Damián García, moves with a more-than-steady hand through the paths of contemporary urban realism. He shows the lives of migrant workers, with their efforts and their problems but also their camaraderie and good times. He also charts the family tensions that grow out of the siblings’ poisoned relationship with their mother, and the different ways Lucila and her brother have adapted to life in Spain, she with resilience, he in a more conflicted and darker key. Only Lucila’s Cuban friends manage, for a moment, to draw a smile out of the troubled Diego.
Ashes turns graver and needlessly dense in its final third, which brings into play elements best left unspoiled, and which repeat some of the most familiar vices of a certain strain of recent Mexican cinema. Curiously, the film feels more natural and generous when it is set in Spain than in the scenes in Mexico, where certain stereotypes of the Latin American cinema that circulates on the festival circuit come out in full force. Even if those scenes are part of the Brenda Navarro novel the film is based on, that is where Luna seems to lose his grip a little on what he is telling and on what the story conveys to the viewer.
Narratively, the script speeds up to the point where the protagonist’s life, once a mix of light and shadow, suddenly loses every last bit of light, as one tragedy after another seems to lash at her: a list of chaotic, anguishing situations lined up and waiting to give her a shower of brutal realism. And without that minimal room for a smile, for good humor or the youthful resilience that Lucila and her friends use to endure the harsh conditions «the First World» has in store for them, Ceniza en la boca is left with nothing but the taste of ashes —a very bitter one, I imagine— that gives the film its title.
