Foreign Film Series: Dos Estaciones
In the bucolic hills of Mexico's Jalisco highlands, iron-willed businesswoman Maria Garcia fights the impending collapse of her tequila factory. The film is at once a vivid portrait of a place and its people, an unsentimental ode to the art and craft of tequila-making, a damning depiction of the results of globalizing economic policies, and an exquisite character study, with Teresa Sánchez delivering a performance of potent restraint. It is rare when a debut feature strikes the perfect balance of ingredients and especially rare when it does so in a distinctive and memorable way. Writer-director Juan Pablo González achieves precisely this in Dos Estaciones. The sense of place is powerful, whether the director takes us into the fields where the jimadores harvest the agave or traces the plants’ fermentation process through the distillery’s machinery, or simply invites us to observe the land and the sky. This is a drama with great attention to detail in those visuals, in the words and silences between characters, and in the layers of sound beneath the dialogue.