The Mexican novelist and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga showed in his scripts for Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel that he'd engraved on his heart Jean-Luc Godard's celebrated dictum to the effect that a movie should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. His deliberately fractured screenplays interweave several narratives and jump around in time and space, and only towards the end do they form a coherent, intelligible whole. So far they have worked well enough, though many people I know found Babel unendurable. Now he's made his directorial debut, collaborating with a highly gifted team of actors and technicians on a similar mosaic or jigsaw-puzzle work, but this time it doesn't come off. Linearised (yes, the word does exist), The Burning Plain would tell the straightforward story of an American housewife (Kim Basinger) who has a tragic affair with a married Mexican-American in a border town, her daughter who is filled with guilt over her mother's affair, and a granddaughter whose father, a crop-dusting pilot, has a serious accident in Mexico.
Arriaga takes these three generations and with wilful mystification splits them into supposedly separate stories that appear to be taking place simultaneously in Mexico, New Mexico and Portland, Oregon, and make glib statements about redemption, fate and the ironies of life. Those unacquainted with Arriaga's technique might be led into thinking that the projectionist has put the reels on in the wrong order (that often happened in back street cinemas during my youth), while those familiar with his work will have difficulty in recognising a sustaining narrative logic of the kind that informs say, Christopher Nolan's masterful Memento. A major disappointment.