Lucila (Anna Diaz) is roughly as conscious of what’s going on because of her age as what time it is in the morning when her mother Isabel (Adriana Paz) leaves her and her four-year-old brother Diego (Sergio Bautista) at the start of the “Ceniza en la Boca (Ashes),” only half-awake as a cab waits outside their apartment and Isabel is about to leave Mexico for Madrid with the children staying behind with a man who it can be assumed from his voice wasn’t selected for his kindness as he barks at Isabel for sneaking off. Although director Diego Luna is vague on details regarding the exact reasons that have prompted Isabel’s departure in his captivating adaptation of Brenda Navarro’s novel of the same name, there isn’t much more that needs to be said other than the wounded expression on Isabel’s face right before she says goodbye to her children, knowing that she’ll be of no use to anyone else if she stays in the life she’s in and at some point she just has to hope that others will understand.
It would be nearly impossible not to by the end of “Ashes,” which is bound to build empathy for anyone caught up in the vicious cycle that Luna depicts so vividly in his fourth narrative feature as a director and his strongest to date when showing how Lucila comes around to comprehending, if not accepting the choices that her mother made when she’s faced with making some of those same decisions for herself. In Navarro’s novel, the narrator went unnamed and spoke in the first person to erase any separation between the audience and the main character, yet Luna and co-writers Diego Rabasa and Abia Castillo elegantly remove any distance without those conceits as it follows Lucila and her now teenage brother across the Atlantic years after Isabel made the trip, engineering a reunion with their mother yet unlikely to see her when she’s working around the clock to keep a roof over her head. While she resents Isabel for disappearing on her, Lucila can start to relate in making a living for herself, becoming a caretaker for upper middle class families of both the young and old, spending much of her time in apartments she couldn’t afford herself or dare to let herself dream of, yet even if she were getting paid enough to potentially move up in the world, she can’t give over her attention to any kind of career when she has Diego to consider, seemingly getting in trouble wherever he goes when it hasn’t been easy to make friends from all the moving around.
There’s an airiness to “Gueros” cinematographer Damián García’s ultra-wide framing that accentuates the feeling of independence and pride Lucila feels as she’s become self-reliant, but also an eeriness when it reflects the fact that being untethered means having no foundation to speak of and there’s a gentle surrealism introduced throughout the film that can seem as if she’s adrift in a universe that’s not her own. (On her way to work, she can be caught staring at a crane lifting a couch into an apartment high above her, seemingly attracted and repulsed by the idea it could crush her.) A tragedy leads her back to Mexico where she still has a community in her grandparents and childhood friends that she can’t have in Spain but is reduced to feeling like a child once more not only by virtue of being back in her old bedroom but the helplessness she felt when her suburban neighborhood isn’t immune to the random violence that occurs on the streets.
The first half of “Ashes” set in Spain may immediately seem like it’s stronger than the second when it comes across as a complete story, but by returning home with fresh eyes, Lucila is able to see what her mother saw even as she can still hold a different perspective on it and Luna finds another gear as the character has to question what may have appeared selfish as a means of survival as she makes her own way forward. Diaz carries the film with impressive stoicism and Paz, who was such a muscular presence in “Emilia Perez” and delivers a searing turn in this year’s Sundance selection “The Huntress,” is deployed sparingly, but looms large over the proceedings, having the gaze of someone who has simply seen too much, leading to a climactic scene between them that feels electric when the mother and daughter finally feel as if they’re on equal footing. The restraint Luna shows throughout only adds to the power of the story where no one ultimately is seen as a villain, but rather the circumstances they were born into and trying to distance themselves from that only leads to a greater disconnect and isolation that can be crippling. Still, for as much that looks to be broken about the world in “Ashes,” the film has a way of making the gaps between people and places seem smaller than they appear, certainly closing the one between the audience and the screen when it’s so absorbing.
“Ceniza En La Boca (Ashes)” will screen again at Cannes on May 15th at 11:15 at Le Cineum Screen X.