Maria Full of Grace

Herald rating: * * * *

As assured and compelling a feature debut as I can remember, this independent Colombian-American production has the low-key observational style of a documentary and the high-concept dramatic punch of the best thrillers.

The tragic true-life stories on which it is based may have a sickening predictability to them, but there's nothing predictable about this film: it keeps us constantly off balance and on edge.

Meanwhile, the artless, heartbreakingly authentic performance by Sandino Moreno, a screen novice who tied with Charlize (Monster) Theron for best actress at Berlin, takes us deep into the life of the title character.

Maria works a dead-end job in Bogota, stripping the thorns off long-stemmed roses for the minimum wage, most of which she delivers to her family. She's under constant pressure from her boss to increase her output and when one day she snaps and quits, her family is horrified, urging her to eat humble pie to get her job back. She's pregnant by her shiftless boyfriend (Guerrero), whose none-too-enthusiastic offer of marriage scarcely sets her heart on fire and so when a handsome, worldly man (Toro) she meets at a disco offers her the chance of easy money, she is easy prey.

The money's the equivalent of a year's pay for a couple of days' work so it's no surprise when it turns out that Maria is to be a "mule" - one of the thousands who smuggle cocaine and heroin in egg-shaped rubber bags in their stomach.

Marston, whose previous CV was limited to a 23-minute student film, observes the process of Maria's training with a chilling exactitude: she perfects her swallowing technique with plump grapes under the eyes of older men who, once she has signed on, switch abruptly from chummy uncles to stern taskmasters. The flight to New York is a small miracle of dramatic tension as much of what can go wrong does go wrong and when Maria arrives at the desks of suspicious customs officers, her problems really begin.

Refreshingly, the film constantly avoids the obvious. The border guards are not caricature thugs but jaded public servants and even the representatives of the seedy drug underworld Maria encounters are not the extravagantly gold-braceleted villains of screen cliche but desperate youngsters caught in the cogs of a massive machine.

When the plot expands in the film's third quarter to explore the life of Colombian illegals in Queens, Marston isn't letting the tension dissipate; he's just remaining faithful to the story he spent months researching in two cities. And he has a keen sense of how the reality of the drug trade is not the one depicted in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic or Ted Demme's Blow; rather it's about lives of quiet despair at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

Amid all this Marston wields his primary symbols with the unforced assurance of a veteran. Most non-Catholics will know the film's title comes from the Catholic prayer, and its echoes ("Blessed art thou amongst women") may seem desperately ironic but it has a core of truth about it: the real irony is underlined in the depiction of Maria as an enhaloed, saintly figure and the ingestion of the poison which is her daily bread as a grotesque form of sacrament.

It's that delicate, suggestive touch and the complete lack of sensationalist hysteria that marks this out as a major achievement. A slightly rosy ending, which seems to position America as the redeeming promised land, may be a false note but it is not too much to say that the first truly great film of the year has arrived.

CAST: Catalina Sandino Moreno, Yenny Paola Vega, Guilied Lopez, Jhon Alex Toro, Patricia Rae, Wilson Guerrero, Jaime Osorio Gomez, Orlando Tobon
DIRECTOR: Joshua Marston
RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes
RATING: M, contains violence, offensive language, drug use