(2009; English and Spanish) A trailer in the New Mexico desert bursts into flames. Somewhere on the Pacific Coast, Sylvia (Charlize Theron) runs a high-class restaurant and sleeps with her cook John ("When you leave your wife, you can talk") and with anyone else to whom she takes a liking; another indication of her self-loathing, she cuts the inside of her thigh with a razor.

After tailing her, a Mexican with a scruffy beard takes her home following a confrontation between John and another man (with whom she'd slept), but Carlos Alarid (José María Yazpik) refuses her sexual favors.

Inside the trailer a man and a woman burned to death; their remains, the flesh having melted together, had to be pried apart for separate funerals. Teenaged Hispanic boys of the dead man, Santiago (J.D. Pardo) and Xavier Martinez, with their family, receive abusive epithets from the husband of the blonde woman who'd been with their father.

The viewer must concentrate, in order to prying apart the riddle of these corpses and their connection with a blonde woman in the US Northwest, throughout the first half of director/writer Guillermo Arriaga's intricately layered film as it moves between these two locations, as well as back and forth in time since events are separated by twelve years.

At a rural airport in Mexico, Santiago Martinez (Danny Pino), now a crop-duster pilot with a pretty, dark-haired, preadolescent daughter Maria (Tessa Ia), gets into his plane, leaving the table where he'd been sitting with his best friend Carlos. After his plane crashes in a field while Maria watches, Carlos takes her to see him in the hospital where Santiago requests a huge favor of his trusted friend.

Interspersed throughout all of these events are scenes of Gina (Kim Bassinger) covertly finding time to get away from her husband and four children to be with Nick Martinez (Joaquim de Almeida) in the trailer. Becoming suspicious, her oldest daughter Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) on a bicycle follows her mother to the secluded trailer.

After the funerals, Santiago initiates contact with the attractive blonde daughter of his father's paramour; meeting out in the desert, they exchange photos and scar themselves (Mariana's suggestion), each on one wrist, with a flame.

By this point in the story, I could discern the connection with Sylvia. Revealing anything further would spoil the carefully concealed identities and relationships Arriaga has taken pains to entangle, obscure, and enigmatize.

However, all becomes apparent, along with the cause of the conflagration, in the latter half except for how Gina (who had a mastectomy three years earlier, leaving an ugly scar in place of her left breast) met and fell in love with Nick. In part the film suggests her motivation may have arisen from her husband's inability to make love with her any longer because of her deformity (though she speaks of considering plastic surgery), but this incident of his aversion appears to happen after the affair had begun.

Why either Nick or Gina would run the risk of losing the love and security of his or her family over an affair is not given sufficient attention. After discovering the truth of her mother's deceits, Mariana says to Gina: "Lots of things are wrong, and they can't be fixed by praying."

Creating a conundrum of these characters and events seems more an affective intellectual exercise of messing with the perceptions of the audience as an artificial device for drama than as an effective artistic instrument toward uncovering a deeper psychological understanding of human trauma.

(I don't think the title is particularly apt. The trailer burned up in the desert; it's not supposed to be wordplay on the crop-duster that crashed, which didn't catch fire. The Burning Pain might have been a better choice.)

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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