FILMS WORTH WATCHING by Robert Alstead

Maria contemplating thumb-sized loads of encapsulated heroin she must swallow.

There’s more than one way to tackle drug crime in moviedom, but few films manage to escape the binary characterizations of rugged cops battling smarmy evildoers with all the requisite gun battles and car chases. Stephen Soderburgh’s Traffic managed to do something different, tracing a line from poverty stricken Mexican locales to affluent US families to underscore the ineffectualness of the so-called war on drugs. Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant had a good-and-evil battle of biblical proportions raging inside one desperate man, Harvey Karteil as a vice-ridden, junkie cop. Then there was Ron Mann who said pass the bong in his marijuana propaganda doc Grass.
Maria, Full of Grace, out this month, focuses on a Colombian 17-year-old, Maria (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who takes one of the most dangerous, and surely highest risk to lowest reward jobs in the drug trafficking industry. She becomes a “mule,” a drug courier who to avoid detection carries the illicit substances across the border in her stomach. She runs the risk of not only a stiff prison sentence if caught, but death if one of the drug-filled plastic pellets breaks. As the film shows, these couriers are often peasant women driven to crime by harsh economic circumstances.
When Maria has a run-in with her unsympathetic boss, she angrily quits her dead-end job as a rose de-thorner. This sets her at bitter odds with her family who rely on her income. Her sense of desperation increases on news that she is pregnant to her immature boyfriend. He, out of duty rather than love, tells her she “has to” marry him now. But the feisty Maria insists that she has no intention of being trapped in a loveless marriage. Maria’s new career comes almost by accident. An out-of-town boy who she dances with at a party offers her an opportunity to earn a small fortune (in Maria’s terms), with one short flight. Only a flicker of doubt shows on her face before she accepts. Morality isn’t considered; she needs the money. The risks are clear though, as we see when Maria later berates her best friend for also becoming a mule.
The tension builds as Maria is interviewed by the avuncular, head mule handler in a taverna back room and later another mule, Lucy, instructs her in swallowing grapes whole as practice for the run. The film shows with almost documentary exactness how the drugs are packaged and prepared, including the day Maria downs 62 of the plastic pellets with sips on soup and her mule handler massaging her stomach to move his merchandise into place. The flight and delivery itself is a tense affair and although Maria proves to be a cool customer, things do not go as smoothly as planned.
Debuting writer and director Joshua Marston’s decision to focus on the human drama, in particular one woman’s story, pays off. Maria is a fascinating mix of the stubborn and assertive and yet also vulnerable and generous of spirit. The well-chosen Hispanic cast and intelligent script help create a strong air of credibility, but it is Moreno’s ability as Maria that conveys the internal struggle of emotions and motivations, often without words, that gives the film its power. The flick doesn’t gloss over the violent nature of the illegal drug industry, but its sympathetic portrait of the mules is morally ambivalent and quietly provocative.

Festival Express
In 1970, a specially commissioned CN train left from Toronto for Calgary with a bevy of bands and rock stars on it, among them Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Buddy Guy, and The Band, drinking and jamming their way across the Canadian countryside. Thirty-four years later footage from the five-day ride has been sought out and lovingly put together. A Canadian Woodstock, it is similar in style and look to the touchstone rock doc of the flower-power era with its split-screen editing, shaky handheld and manic zooms, but lacks the same immediacy or impact. Woodstock had torrential rain, logistics problems, and the war in Vietnam. Festival Express has teens demanding free access to the gigs, nostalgic modern day interviews with surviving Express riders and the problem of where to refuel the train bar (an unscheduled stop at Saskatoon, as it happens). That said, fans of the music will appreciate that the film has been structured around the previously unseen and often raw performances. These range from impromptu jams in cramped rail cars to concert performances in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary, including Janice Joplin’s memorably gutsy performances of Cry Baby and Tell Mama only two months before she died of a drug overdose.

Robert Alstead, who also writes for iofilm.

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