Best International Film: Mexico's "Prayers for the Stolen"
Sunday, November 21, 2021 at 4:23PM 
I don't usually take notes while watching films. However, after a screening ends, I might run to my notebook or laptop to jot down some detail, the description of an incredible image I want to preserve in my memory. It's especially true when I know I'm reviewing said film later on, as was the case with Tatiana Huezo's narrative feature debut, Prayers for the Stolen or Noche de Fuego. This time, though, I didn't just have a couple of stray compositions that had left an impression. Indeed, I wrote down a review's worth of small observations, fleeting images that captured the imagination, portentous symbolism that enchanted through its menace, sounds echoing in my head long after the credits rolled. Such is Huezo's ability to draw poetry from harsh realism
Watching Mexico's Oscar submission is to be immersed in a cinematic world of dangerous beauty, a sinister corner of the country, rural and ruthless. In the right circumstances, the vast landscapes of mountains and poppy fields might have looked pastoral, but there's far too much menace in the air for it to register...
That horror comes from the cartels that terrorize the community and enchain them to a drug economy nobody can escape. The men have departed long ago to work far away, perhaps even on the other side of the border. As for the women and children, they've been left behind to fend for themselves. They get no help from the colluding authorities or the faithless outsiders that always abandon the place when they understand the dimensions of their own powerlessness.
In this adaptation of a Jennifer Clement novel, every boy knows what awaits them, that once they become young men, they will work for the cartel and become more soldiers in endless warfare. As for the girls, they can only hope to be spared the desirous attention of men. So often are they kidnapped, to be trafficked or raped, that the mothers have established a series of collective strategies to protect them. When they reach a certain age, long hair must be shorn to make feminine figures look boyish from a distance. For those whose faces may have been mauled by malady or violence, that haircut can be delayed. What's important is that they do not inspire want.
Still, no shaven head will deter the inevitable forever. One day, the black SUVs will drive up the road and demand their pound of flesh, flying through the landscape like knights of the apocalypse spelling doom for everyone. When that happens, each girl knows they have to hide. Some matriarchs have even dug up holes in the ground to hide their daughters. They are wombs of dirt and prisons, too, salvation in the form of a tomb. And yet, despite the constant dread, the chronic fear of the whole community, the mothers try to preserve a spell of innocence. So their children shall have a childhood, innocent and unencumbered by the full knowledge of cruel futures.
That may seem like an impossibility, but Huezo dispels us of such doubts. Following a group of three young girls from childhood to adolescence, the director explores how such a life can be bearable, even beautiful. Repudiating both glamorization and miserabilist nihilism, the camera is hungry for dazzlement, for that magic which is born out of banality. It's an old bike against a squalid wall, made gorgeous by points of sunlight, like paint strokes over the shadows. It's a wall of stone, crumbling to dust like a wave, the mountain transfigured into an ocean. It's the sudden slip of a clumsy cow, the bang she makes against the floor, reverberating through the startled little bodies of mischievous kids.
Above all, the union between the three friends gives Prayers for the Stolen an anchor of plaintive humanity, grounding every spellbinding sight and sound to an aching portrait of childhood. Their silly games are registered with respect and not an ounce of adult superiority, lowering the camera to their perspective, both in physical and psychological terms. One thinks of the intimacy of a hiding spot under fitted sheets and red lights or a telepathic jest filmed in a pirouetting track. But, most of all, one recalls how each child leans on the other, peers facing off against a world that's full of pain. Like us, they rarely see the horror, but it's there all along. We hear it. We feel it in our bones, in our souls.
Two instants of human touch crystalize these realities. First, three bodies floating in the murky blueness of a stream. Holding hands, they're inseparable. The camera gazes from beneath the surface, making their faces obscured so that they look as if they're soaring in a bed of light and dead leaves. In this memory of childhood, their sisterhood makes the girls soar above any real-life nightmare. Another, more private episode is just between mother and daughter, a desperate hug that says galaxies without a single word. The silence is enough, sepulchral but tense with worry, with love. A mother's scared severity and her daughter's rebelliousness melt away for a second, for a brief moment where they express all they mean to one another with an embrace.
Even the darkest lives contain sublimity and peace, genuine joy, and the contemplation of delight. To flatten the complexity of a harsh existence into unilateral unchanging torment is a disservice, a disrespect, a sad commonality in many films that pertain to shine a light on difficult circumstances. Through incredible direction, Huezo centers girlhood under peril but is able to see beyond the dark forces that loom nearby. Moreover, this erstwhile documentarian has a prodigious ability with actors, getting great performances from both her young and adult cast, with special kudos to Mayra Batalla as a stalwart mother. Huezo's Prayers for the Stolen is a poem of solidarity, sisterhood, and innocence that resists and stubbornly survives like a dandelion bursting through concrete.
Prayers for the Stolen is streaming on Netflix. Don't miss it!
Reader Comments (1)
The ending scene makes me remember inmediatelly the colombian film "Los Colores de la Montaña" (The Colors of the Mountain) even when the treatment from the same item is from a different perspective in each film.
The directorial work from Tatiana Huezo is as good as Fernanda Valadez in "Sin Señas Particulares" (Identifying Features) film which from my perspective it would it be a stronger contender for the Oscar. The plot twist in the last part and the end scene are devastating.
But "Noches de Fuego" (Prayers for the Stolen" is very solid for sure and I absolutely agree that Mayra Batalla gives the best acting work. My favorite moments are the scenes that involves the character of the teacher, rightfully played by Memo Villegas who is more known for his comic work.