Search

Blossoms Of Fire

2000, Movie, NR, 74 mins

Blossoms Of Fire: Review

BLOSSOMS OF FIRE
starstarstarstar
Longtime documentary editor Maureen Gosling's 16mm portrait of the thriving matriarchal culture of Juchitan, a city of 100,000 in the center of notoriously macho Mexico, is at heart a socialist realist travelogue in the tradition of Orson Welles' unfinished It's All True, shot in Brazil in 1940, or Sergei Eisenstein's 1940 Time in the Sun (compiled from footage shot for the never-completed Que Viva Mexico! in 1931 and '32) — Gosling even incorporates some of Eisenstein's shimmering black-and-white footage of women in traditional garb. But while the subject is potentially fascinating, Gosling's unfocused, sluggish film is a case study in missed opportunities. Juchitan is located on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and its cultural mores are rooted in indigenous Zapotec traditions. Juchitan's women are legendary for their natural beauty, strength and self-confidence: Painter Frida Kahlo embraced their traditional dress — blouses embroidered with brilliantly colored flowers, ruffled skirts and distinctive head wraps — as an expression of both national identity and as a legacy of women in control of their own destinies. They control the family finances and run their own businesses, making paper flowers, marinating plums in honey, baking tortillas, and selling fish, vegetables and fresh fruit at the central market. They form the backbone of a local economy so strong it attracts workers from other communities. Juchitan culture includes a long history of embracing muxe — a term that includes lesbians, gay men and transgendered people — who live openly with their partners and face little homophobic discrimination from their families and neighbors. Gosling focuses on individuals, allowing a spectrum of women to describe their own lives, but her efforts to put their experiences into a larger historical or social context is unsystematic and incomplete; she shows Kahlo's paintings without explaining why an artist raised on the outskirts of cosmopolitan Mexico City would adopt rural Oaxacan clothing, she uses Eisenstein's footage without exploring the region's appeal to outsiders, and she introduces the question of preserving Zapotec language and traditions without establishing the details of the relationship between the Oaxaca region's Zapotec-inflected customs and mainstream Mexican culture. Gosling's flat, gee-whiz voice-over doesn't help matters, and overall all it's hard not to wish she'd risen to the richness of her material. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
Advertisement

Advertisement

Related Websites

You might be also interested in the following websites:

Most Popular TV Shows

  1. NCIS
  2. Dancing with the Stars
  3. The Game
  4. Biggest Loser
  5. American Idol
more popular tv shows

Most Popular Celebrities

  1. Morgan Freeman
  2. Tiger Woods
  3. Drew Barrymore
  4. Jake Gyllenhaal
  5. Robert De Niro
more popular celebrities

Most Popular Movies

  1. The Twilight Saga: New Moon
  2. The Blind Side
  3. 2012
  4. Old Dogs
  5. A Christmas Carol
more popular movies

Top Videos

  1. Victorias Secret
  2. Glee
  3. Biggest Loser
  4. Desperate Housewives
  5. NCIS
more top videos