Ashes

Directed by Diego Luna, Ashes (Ceniza en la boca) tells the story of Lucila (La Cocina‘s Anna Díaz), who follows her mother (Adriana Paz) from Mexico to Spain, years after she left the family in the middle of the night. While others her age attend university and spend their youth finding themselves, Lucila burns the candle at both ends. When she is not working several jobs, she has to take care of her teenage brother, who is not handling the relocation well. Not even a move to Barcelona brings the sense of freedom Lucila had hoped for.

Adapted from Brenda Navarro’s novel, Lucila’s journey is told in fragmented pieces, intimate glances. Its individual chapters are separated by flashes to white, evoking a sense of new pages being turned. There is a dedication to realism in the absence of gratuitous exposition in the characters’ dialogues, the scenes speak with their own voice. Luna’s restrained storytelling refuses to exploit his characters’ suffering and eschews cheap emotional manipulation. The downside to this lean and matter-of-fact approach to depicting a life full of stressors is that the singular outburst the audience witnesses feels almost hyperbolic by comparison. In the following image, Lucila is shown so depleted, the elderly lady she is paid to care for has to pack her suitcase – an image that risks accidental comedy.

As a whole there is little fault to be found with the picture – Ashes is a perfectly sound and technically proficient study of trauma, liminality and estrangement. However there is also not a lot that stands out, as it lacks the visceral spark needed to pierce through a (festival) audience’s collective emotional fatigue. Hopefully appealing to a crowd less likely to be oversaturated by the social-problem film, Ashes offers a powerful, sincere look at the migrant experience and establishes Luna as a filmmaker of remarkable poise.