PORTRAIT OF MARIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 392, 27 December 1946, Page 17

PORTRAIT OF MARIA

(M-G-M International)

HIS, by all that’s wonderful, is that Mexican production Maria Cantelaria, which was noted in these pages recently as having won

high praise, and an award, at the International Cinema Festival at Cannes this year. An obvious item for the connoisseur’s "must see" list, it will also, I think, have fairly wide general appeal. Portrait of Maria is the tragic story of a Mexican-Indian girl, a peasant of

Xochimilco, hounded to her death by ill-fortune, ignorance, and superstition. Her mother had been stoned by the peasants as "a woman of the streets" (sic) and Maria herself is an outcast simply because she is her mother’s daughter. There is a man who loves her and risks the hatred of his community to protect her; there is a priest who comforts her and an artist from the city who befriends her; but nothing goes well for Maria. Elemental forces are at work; her end is predestined, and the. story moves with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy towards the climax in which the natives, believing that Maria has allowed herself to be painted in the: nude, put her to death for her shamelessness. This story is told with great pictorial beauty and a natural simplicity right outside the Hollywood convention. The camerawork is magnificent: the Mexican landscapes are superb in themselves and the players have been placed among them by someone with such a fine sense of composition that effects of true loveliness are frequently achieved. The acting, particularly of the two wha portray the girl and her lover, has the same. unaffected native charm, the same feel- ing for mood and place. As Maria, Dolores Del Rio seems here to be in her natural element; her beauty suits the part and she moves with the easy grace of the larger cats. All that is wrong with the film is its dialogue. The original language has been replaced, through the process known as "dubbing," by English speech, and the effect is curiousl and disappointingly banal. It is not that the -lip movements fail to synchronise with the words: it is rather that the words and the very timbre of the voices uttering them are out of harmony with the mood of the story. * * * [N . the supporting, programme was a March of Time item on modern Mexico which served, in a rather un-. usual way, to underline and illuminate the social and political content of Portrait of Maria. Yes, you can’t get away from ‘social content even in a film like this. The villain who lusts after Maria’ and, unsuccessful, eggs the villagers on to destroy her, is the local landowner and exploiter of the peasants’ labour, a wretch whose nasty anti-Social behaviour is as sharply defined as that of any bourgeois capitalist "menace" in any Soviet silent film. He is, in fact, almost illogical in his villainy. Nobody, not even a child-or an illiterate Mexican-could possibly fail to recognise him for what he is. On the other hand, there is a priest in the story and he is treated as a kindly and sympathetic character. And this attitude of the film, one gathered from the March of Time item, must correspond to the present political set-up of Mexico, a country which is basically Socialist but not anti-clerical.