Saturday, October 13, 2012

MARIA FULL OF GRACE (Spanish) (2004)


‘It’s what’s inside that counts’, stating the Intel advertisement on airport, justifying so beautifully the end and theme of this worth witnessing Spanish film. The film is a beautiful debut of Catalina Sandino Moreno who gave the film the larger perspective. It’s about seventeen years pregnant Maria supporting her working class Colombian family. in order to get new job she gets involved in drug mule. She has to fly USA carrying more than sixty pellets of cocaine in her stomach. Things do not happen as plan in hostile land where her two partners are adding and worsening her already troubled choice.

Without much of routine melodrama and without being too harrowing or dark, the film managed to bring the personal tension from the moment onwards we see what Maria is supposed to do in drug trade. It fixes and sets the drama and thrill with equal tension towards it reaches the end which is beautiful but predictable. That airport check up tension instantly reminds me about ‘Midnight Express’, but it’s not the film as dark and harrowing one, rather it draws a sympathetic character driven drama with illegal trade. Above all the strongest reason to watch the film is Moreno’s brilliant and graceful Oscar nominated performance. 

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