Melissa Tamminga’s review published on Letterboxd:
(This review is a part of a two-film post on Seattle Screen Scene, featuring both Ixcanul and 45 Years.)
Ixacanul opens on a young woman’s passive form and impassive face. Her name is Maria (María Mercedes Coroy), and her mother (María Telón) dresses her and then smooths, parts, and plaits her hair, securing a crown-like garland upon her head. The two Mayan women, alone together in their home, near a volcano, an ixcanul, in a remote region of Guatemala, both absorbed and silent in the exclusive intimacy of their shared activity, indicate that they inhabit a world with which they are familiar, and I am not. I guess, as I first look at them, that Maria is not quite happy to be so taken in hand by her mother – or perhaps she is not quite happy with the event, unknown as yet to me, for which she is being prepared.
The film could be described as a coming of age tale: Maria has arrived at a marriageable age, and while her parents, hard-working but poor villagers, eagerly seek the best match for her, she herself, in the mini-rebellion many coming of age tales feature, looks, instead, at the young man she prefers and grapples with newly awakened sexual feelings that she’d prefer to explore on her own, rather than within her parents’ control. Maria’s story explores the boundaries of her individual desires, of her parents’ control. Maria grows up over the course of the film, and she is a new person as it closes. And all the pains of her growing up make little fissures in my heart.
But the film could also be described as a socio-political tale: the residents of Maria’s village live under the shadow of a coffee plantation, the white owner, never seen, except perhaps in iconic form, haunts the workers; distinct classes form within the plantation system, those closest to the master with most power, those farthest from him with least. The comparatively wealthy plantation manager alone owns a vehicle, and he holds all the power of livelihood for each family in the village.
Squirming under the class system, many in the village dream of America and spin tales of the strange place, big with promise, that they have not seen, but warn one another of how terribly they will be treated by the “white people,” should they go there. And in the course of the film, two from the village are, we might say, swallowed whole by that incomprehensible larger, more powerful world, and are never seen again. The little village, speaking only the Mayan language, cannot engage, even when pressed by desperate circumstances, in the tactics and language of those with more wealth and power. They agree to what they do not comprehend and are shattered. And I choke and seethe at the injustice played out before me.
And yet, powerful as the coming of age story or the political tale might be, the heart of the film is with Maria and her mother, and the little domestic space they occupy, the close – if sometimes fraught – relationship they share.
Read the rest over at Seattle Screen Scene.