The Devil Smokes, which premiered at the 75th Berlinale is set in Mexico City in the mid-1990s, where five young siblings are left alone in the care of their grandmother, as their father has left in search of their mother, whose sudden crises and erratic behaviour even lead her to leave home. The grandmother, with the beginnings of dementia, paranoid, believes the house to be invaded by hostile beings who lie in wait for the slightest opportunity to assault her.
The children in The Devil Smokes look after each other, long for their mother, pamper their grandmother and at the same time defend the family unit at all costs, even confronting the social services that are trying to protect them. They do not hesitate to lie naively as we watch them grapple with their situation of helplessness, abandonment and the need to rely on their parents, to explain to themselves how they got there and the longing for a happy, fun life in which they learned to fend for themselves.
Ernesto Martínez Bucio shows us in his first feature film the progressive degradation of the children’s living conditions, the unstoppable madness of the grandmother, and their isolation from the outside world, bringing out the best in his cast (Mariapau Bravo Aviña, Rafael Nieto Martínez, Regina Alejandra, Laura Uribe Rojas, Donovan Said, Carmen Ramos, Micaela Gramajo and Bernardo Gamboa), which is captivating, with an incredible naturalness and interaction. None of the children had any acting experience of their own and the result of their work is commendable perfection, we recognise each character, each reaction and at the same time their evolution within the plot, their emotions come to the surface in a thrilling way without losing their spontaneity.
The director has drawn on snippets from his childhood to construct a story with these premises: “Count the parts, never the whole. Don’t reconstruct the space. Memories resemble memories, fragments glued together with imagination. Dig into the gaps. Avoid metaphor. Materialize. Deny cause-and-effect without abandoning consequence. Let things unfold. Work hard without knowing exactly why. The horizon isn’t important, you just need to keep walking. Seek the honest mistake and allow it to exist. Preserve it, nurture it, and let it grow without fear. Bury fear. Play. Laugh. Cry. Dream. Find the good mistake. Fail better”. Martínez Bucio manages to structure his film in a fluid way, providing the information that the viewer can gather and assimilate, to construct a vivid and individualised family mosaic.
The staging evolves little by little from an open and inclusive framework, where the outside is present, to the claustrophobia of feeling enclosed in a cage. The children, under the grandmother’s orders, cover the windows with paper, isolate themselves completely, internalise new routines and finally come to ration their food. Abandoned to their fate, emotional survivors, fragile and blindly attached to the only thing they have left, life has fatally confined them. Throughout the days, in which their summer holidays have replaced school freedom with life freedom and, finally, with the burden of responsibility, the children have gradually lost their dreams, their trust in life and in adults. Day by day, they have suffered the pain of loss over and over again, starting with their parents, one by one, their pets, their most precious possessions, in a forced and also voluntary sacrifice, to end up relying on the only thing they have left, themselves, their loyalty and their unconditional attachment.
No one has posted any comments yet. Be the first person!