Grim and gloomy, Ixcanul situates its tragic rustic narrative beneath an active volcano, this looming presence granting the surrounding landscape a Mordor-esque barrenness, cast in asphalt tones of black and gray. Always subtly present, and significantly menacing, the titular mount is also barely seen directly, glimpsed in passing as characters live out their austere lives in its long shadow. A sight that most movies would consign to an easy ominous symbol, this one instead reserves for something more quietly portentous, granting the mountain a textured quality that sums up the subtle complexity with which it operates. Instead of sticking it square in the background or allowing it to dominate shots, first-time director Jayro Bustamante instead makes great use of the fact that this possible harbinger of doom also sustains the local coffee plantation, which by turn both sustains and threatens the Kaqchikel tribe, a Mayan offshoot whose members, at least as depicted here, eke out a simple life via subsistence farming.
Shot in a straightforward, unstylized fashion, the film initially seems to aim for ethnography, documenting a remote agrarian lifestyle barely considered by most of those who start their day off with a hot cup of joe. Gradually, however, Ixancul reveals deeper motives. These mostly stem from the central story of María (María Mercedes Coroy), a teenager on the brink of adulthood, who helps her family sharecrop for the plantation, while also managing their own small farm. María is casually involved with Pepe (Marvin Coroy), a laborer with big dreams, who’s preparing to illegally emigrate to the United States in order to fulfill them. María has humbler goals, restricted mostly to wondering what’s on the other side of the volcano. The small confines of her life are accentuated further when she becomes promised in an arranged marriage – to a plantation foreman – designed to help her parents’ professional standing. Frustrated with her circumstances, María finally accepts the rough advances of a drunken Pepe the night before he departs, forcing her world open while also pushing her further back into the traditional one.
Ixcanul is full of these kinds of variations and revelations. Unable to speak Spanish, María is linked to a vanishing culture which, despite its once mighty status, now retains little currency in a modern world. In this scenario, the figures known as “whites” are a doubly distant, almost spectral presence, albeit one that has a heavy bearing on the course of the narrative. Modernity is presented as both a blessing and a curse, and in line with the film’s ambivalent approach to such intrusions, foreign influence is portrayed as both a tool of expansion – broadening the family’s horizons while introducing new ways of thinking and behavior – and one of diminution – threatening to erase their specific way of life forever. One of the few equivalent features of both lifestyles is the subjugation María suffers at the hands of nearly everyone around her; burying her beauty beneath dirt and a series of consistently distressed facial expressions, Bustamante shoots his protagonist in ways that draw visual comparisons both to Catholic saints (her name suggesting the Holy Mother, a parallel the film wryly comments on throughout) and farming implements – not to mention the family pigs, with whom she sympathizes as one is prepared for the slaughter, returning to the herd during subsequent moments of crisis.
Befitting this portrayal, Ixcanul both opens and closes with scenes of ritualized preparation, in which María is dressed by her mother to face some specific stressful scenario. In between, the character is tossed haphazardly back and forth from one interest to another, employed variously as a bargaining chip marriage offering, a magic talisman, a sexual plaything and a victim of an exceedingly personal theft. Despite this arduous treatment, the film manages to avoid turning into a perverse Von Trier-style procession of female misery, maintaining an insistently light touch and a healthy measure of empathy, despite the often dreary subject matter.
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