VIVA 2011: DESIERTO ADENTRO (THE DESERT WITHIN) review

Ultimately, the thing that sinks Rodrigo Plá's The Desert Within is how it never once comes to life in any particularly distinctive way. The film follows a poor farmer in revolutionary Mexico whose hubris leaves him exiled to a barren scrap of desert, building a church to try and make amends for the awful things he was responsible for. It's a premise that's crying out for an auteur to take the wheel, but Plá doesn't seem to know which auteur he wants to be. There are stabs at epic period grandeur, Jodorowsky-style fever-dream surrealism and painterly formalism a la Terence Malick, but the director never pushes any of these far enough to leave a lasting impression.

After the government sends in the troops to clamp down on religious expression, Elias (Mario Zaragoza), a farmer in a rural village, is left bereft of spiritual counselling. When his heavily pregnant wife suffers a fall and it looks as if she might lose the baby, the family demands he fetch a priest from the city to baptise the unborn child in the event it ends up stillborn. Elias makes the journey, bullying one of the clergy into coming back with him.

Unknowingly he's been followed by soldiers convinced his clandestine expedition signals another uprising. In the chaos and persecution that follows, Elias' family are saved, but at a terrible cost. Furious, Elias' mother banishes him and his children. Convinced this disaster is divine punishment of some kind, the farmer decamps into the desert, swearing he'll dedicate the rest of his life to building a new church as penitence, hoping this will invite some kind of miracle as a sign he's been forgiven.

It's a handsome enough production, DP Serguei Saldívar Tanaka shooting in arid, blue-filtered widescreen, with the film ranging between hardscrabble peasant villages, empty wastelands and the city with quiet confidence. Plá, on his sophomore feature after 2007's La Zona, handles the technical demands well enough to hide any budgetary limitations. There are no complex setpieces, only brief moments of action and much of the running time centres on the church going up, but the narrative makes all this seem relatively natural.

The problem is the way the story progresses on paper is all well and good, but the plot points seem to suggest a potential that's never quite fulfilled by how they're presented on screen. The Desert Within has enough thematic material for five or six films; it touches on blind faith, guilt, repentance, even a dose of national identity. There's melodrama, filial duties gone badly wrong and skewed psychosexual relations, yet Plá never seems to have any idea how to make any of these things really catch the audience's attention.

This is a film where a father driven mad by self-hatred shuts his son inside a wooden chest to induce visions the boy can later paint as offerings to venerate a distant, terrible Creator; where the son crossed the desert as a baby inside a box that once contained a holy relic, and where a man's faith sends countless people to their deaths. It seems reasonable to expect it to be either gloriously, excessively baroque or coldly austere, but it can't manage either.

While the production design looks professional enough, the visuals aren't especially distinctive. The animated intermissions between the early acts are gorgeous, a wonderful motif later adapted to show the paintings coming to life. But there's precious little else like this. Plus while the cast are clearly trying, none of them manage to flesh out their roles enough to actually command the screen, and the lack of any real standout passages in the script kills much of their effort.

It's painfully obvious Elias has issues, and neither the performances nor the dialogue provide any real justification for why the people around him don't pick up on this en masse and after a certain point run off and leave him to it. Needless to say, they don't - to be fair, it wouldn't be much of a film if they did, but it robs the story of proper dramatic impetus, leaving you merely curious how bad things still have left to get rather than genuinely invested in any of it.

The climax is particularly maddening, in that Plá leaves his protagonists right on the verge of showing a plausible reaction to what's going on, then drags them right back into the whole ghastly mess. By this point the epilogue feels like a weary slog towards the finish line rather than any kind of intelligent or compassionate artistic summation of what just happened.

Rodrigo Plá's second film has moments that stick with you, and it backs its ambition up with enough professionalism it impresses on some level. But it just seems far too restrained, overall, and never pitches any of these moments with enough enthusiasm to feel like the grand statement it clearly aches to be. While it might entertain anyone hungry for more films from the region who's willing to overlook its shortcomings, next to the number of features that have been over the same ground far more effectively The Desert Within doesn't warrant much more than a cautious recommendation.

(Desierto Adentro was screened as part of the 17th Viva Spanish & Latin American Film Festival, which was run at the Cornerhouse Theatre in Manchester from 5th-27th March 2011.)