There is a startling moment in the soulful Mexican drama “Dos Estaciones” when it shifts from the protagonist to a secondary character. Movies often take detours, yet when they pop into a supporting player’s life or nose around the story’s periphery, it’s usually to expand on the main event. Here, though, the diversion is so imbued by the secondary character’s being, so organic and leisurely, that it feels like the beginning of another movie entirely.
I’ve thought a lot about this detour the two times that I’ve watched “Dos Estaciones.” The story centers on María (Teresa Sánchez), who owns a failing tequila factory in Jalisco, Mexico. It takes a while to get a handle on her. She’s stolid, stoic and somewhat ambiguous — from a distance, she could pass for a man — and the writer-director Juan Pablo González doesn’t proffer chunks of explanation. You have to piece María together from where her gaze lands, how she walks, holds her head and stands next to others. You also have to listen to what she says and to the heaviness of her silences.
The story tracks María through her day-to-day at the factory, which once belonged to her father. It’s a bright, spacious facility filled with gleaming modern equipment but no longer has enough workers to make it buzz. The reasons for its decline emerge piecemeal throughout the movie in worried references to a disease that’s affecting the agave, in the stack of unpaid bills in María’s office and, crucially, in references to foreign competitors who are threatening her patrimony. When she curses about “gringos” under her breath, it feels personal: González’s family runs the factory used in the movie.
Things happen, quietly, and with scrupulous precision, and María’s life slowly fills in. Her truck doesn’t start; she samples tequila; confers with her employees. She’s habitually by herself, or almost — oftentimes some workers bustle nearby. At one point, she goes to a small party where she meets a friendly young woman, Rafaela (Rafaela Fuentes, one of several nonprofessional actors in the cast). Rafaela once worked in another tequila factory and is now looking for work. As the women chat, sliding into a natural, sympathetic vibe, María furtively looks at Rafaela and then offers her a job.
As is true throughout the movie, nothing goes as expected. González has made a handful of documentaries, mostly shorts; I imagine that he’s watched his share of art films. The rhythms in “Dos Estaciones” are somewhat slower than those in contemporary industrial cinema, but the movie never drags, and González doesn’t indulge in excessive longueurs or pointless ambiguities. His most notable strategy (aesthetic and political) is to soften the line between fiction and nonfiction, incorporating documentary-style passages into the fiction that enrich its sense of place and of a people — its realism.
The first scene is exemplary in this respect. It opens in a field of mature blue agave plants under a vivid blue sky where a man is using a shovel to shave off the large spiky leaves, exposing the heart of the plant, called the piña (Spanish for pineapple). It’s a mesmerizing interlude, partly because the man’s gestures are so exacting and relatively unfamiliar but also because the light and high-contrast colors are beautiful. If this were a different movie, say, a straight documentary, you might expect some exegesis to come next — cue the voice-over — but the scene has the quality of a dream, and it’s inviting.
In time, the piñas are tossed into baskets carried by mules, loaded onto trucks and driven to the factory. There, they’re baked in enormous ovens and subsequently fermented, distilled and cask-aged under María’s direction. It can take up to 20 years to make tequila, an artisanal process that González reveals incrementally over the course of the movie. If he gives it so much attention, it’s partly because the manufacturing, in its quotidian textures and difficult work, offers a window onto María herself. With its modest means, painstaking labor and aggressive, industrial competition, it also mirrors this kind of independent artistic cinema.
At once specific and expansive, “Dos Estaciones” can be described several ways: as a drama, a character study, a meditative exploration of the ravages of globalization. At the same time, part of the movie’s pleasure is how it avoids facile categorization, like when it takes that detour I mentioned earlier to follow María’s hairdresser, a trans woman, Tatín (Tatín Vera), as she goes out on the town, enjoys a one-night stand, talks about art and later goes shopping. As Tatín shops, she hails townspeople, and you grasp that these streets and this scene — along with the agave, the blazing sun and the rich red earth — describe, better than any genre label could, María, her world and this striking movie.
Dos Estaciones
Not rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters.
