Country: Mexico
Director: Juan Pablo González
Time: 1 hour and 39 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Apple ($4.99 to rent); GooglePlay ($3.99 to rent)
What It Evokes: Unspoken desire, agricultural communities, individuals confronting impersonal forces
I like to quote Robert Bresson’s injunction, “Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.” At its simplest, Bresson’s statement encourages directorial restraint. Naturally, meaning (that hefty word) in good film (that shape shifting term) arrives neither arbitrarily, nor in fixed form. To state the banal: movies (like all art) demand good faith negotiation between their creators and audience. Predictable (i.e. boring) works wrest power from audiences in ways that discourage further thought (cf. infantilization). By contrast, excellent films remain subtle films, robust enough to withstand continued consideration: they never have a point, but instead offer myriad insights that audiences shape and augment—directors take on trust the existence of audiences capable of engaging complex works on their own terms, while audiences trust directors to have nuanced things to “say.”
Juan Pablo González's magisterial Dos Estaciones cedes much power to its audience, a result of its subtlety, restraint, and trust. It tells the story of María, the head of her family’s struggling tequila factory in Jalisco—the blue agave plant from which tequila comes is native to the region—and explores her attempts to turn her company’s fortunes around after hiring Rafaela (a sort of all-purpose second-in-command), while closely examining the women's unfurling relationship. In the background hovers a disease threatening the agave harvest, as well as faceless “gringos” (Americans) whose large multinational liquor firms have been buying up fertile land and locking in agave supply from various local farmers with seemingly endless infusions of capital. Nested within this central story are extended vignettes featuring María’s hairdresser, a trans woman named Tatín, who begins a relationship with a local man and aspires to renovate her small hair salon. It’s an exquisite piece of filmmaking that leverages an examination of quotidian difficulties in order to interrogate some of life’s central structuring elements.
As such, Dos Estaciones (translation: Two Seasons, the name of María’s tequila) touches on the effects of climate change (the unnamed agave disease), the impacts of de-personalized economic forces (the gringos), the ways trade policy between America and Mexico continues to upend social identities and more or less settled rhythms of life (the gringos again), various forms of unspoken or occasionally articulated desire (Tatín and her lover; María and Rafaela), alienation (María), and the complex hierarchies and forms of paternalism that inform relationships within agricultural communities (María and her employees). Of course, abstracting from characters and their relationships in order to highlight a film’s thematic concerns risks undermining its subtlety. Marking a film as “about X, Y, and Z” reveals little about its worthiness—after all, Marvel movies can be as closely analyzed as any other piece of cinema—and Dos Estaciones succeeds based on its ability to compel through its robust characterization of complex individuals.
Shot in a presentational style that borrows heavily from the documentary (and the Italian neo-realists), the film’s breathtaking visuals and lingering shots—close-ups of weathered faces, wide shots of the harvest—augment and accentuate taciturn characters’ unfurling relationships. Communication emerges through expressions, gaits, glances, and gestures, as much as through dialogue. The film’s characters are individuals of few words, whose projection of authority requires cloistered self-presentations.
This remains most true of María and Rafaela, the film’s central pairing. After a brief encounter at a mutual acquaintance’s birthday party, during which Rafaela describes being laid off from another tequila factory, María offers her a job as a general fixer. (Because María’s business has cash flow problems, she gives Rafaela lodging in her home as part of her compensation.) It’s clear that isolation, as much as María’s substantial work burden, leads her to employ Rafaela. In this way, desire remains a central constituent of their connection, yet the precise contours of that desire remain ambiguous and unspoken. The film remains coy about María’s sexuality, though a queer reading probably makes the most sense. In the end, however, it doesn’t really matter. María’s desire isn’t primarily sexual. Instead, it’s grounded in a need for human companionship (broadly conceived) and fellow understanding. This leads her relationship with Rafaela to develop along parallel tracks, each with its own power dynamic. While working, María remains the employer and boss; outside of work, María aspires to Rafaela’s approbation and affirmation. Whether this arrangement can continue without succumbing to the tensions borne of its inherent contradictions gives the film a sizable portion of its propulsive thrust.
In this way, the film explores forms of isolation emanating from responsibility (towards employees, towards dependents, towards family legacy) in the face of impersonal forces that cannot be controlled (climactic, economic). In one choice scene, María performs wheelies in a dirt clearing, her tires kicking up dust that completely enshrouds her truck. It’s a metaphor that illustrates her sense of circling-in-place absent clear direction, evoking both claustrophobia and separation. Throughout, the film beautifully examines how individuals whose self-conceptions privilege self-reliance endure disjuncture and alienation, as well as the ways they seek solace through human connections.
Dos Estaciones is also a film grounded in a particular place, in this case Jalisco’s agricultural communities. (Per the Mexican Ministry for Agriculture and Rural Development, the state is the largest producer of agricultural goods in Mexico.) On the film’s terms, these communities merge forms of self-sufficiency and communal support. María assists less well-off individuals and relies upon their forbearance when times are tough. Communication of a personal or revelatory sort remains minimal. Understandings go largely unspoken, stresses accumulate, and abandonment comes without warning. The potential for catastrophe—in the form of a bad harvest—continually lingers. In spite of scientific advancements, the land continues to be a hard master, and it crafts hard individuals in its image. Pace various romanticized views of farming, the film has a clear-eyed vision of the profession’s challenges and the thin (almost arbitrary) line between poverty and plenty.
Subtle, beautiful, and thoughtful, Dos Estaciones’ restraint seeds its generative quality. Its depiction of human relationships under difficult conditions captures something deeply true about the search for solace in others. It asks questions concerning our role within larger processes that take little account of our desires and efforts—the film shares many affinities with the Greek tragedy, while also featuring a range of biblical metaphors (plague, flood, fire). Throughout, González’s beautiful work offers an endless assortment of oppositions that contour interpretation without confining it: the local and the international; the personal and the impersonal; the traditional and the innovative; agent and structure; all while building complex characters whose particular strengths and blindspots speak to something deeply universal. Dos Estaciones is well worth your time.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Juan Pablo González — Caballerango (2018)
Carlos Reygadas — Silent Light (2007)