It is a morbid tradition of children’s fiction that parents must often be dispatched, as quickly and unsentimentally as possible, for the adventure to proceed — sometimes discreetly, or sometimes, as in Roald Dahl’s “James and the Giant Peach,” as violently as a rhinoceros attack in paragraph two. In storybook logic, such eliminations often enable a blithe sense of liberty for young protagonists; for the five siblings at the center of “The Devil Smokes (and Saves the Burnt Matches in the Same Box),” the disappearance of their parents cues a gradual collapse of reality as they know it, more frightening than freeing. Occupying an eerie, agitated middle ground between realism and unanchored dream logic, Mexican director Ernesto Martínez Bucio‘s striking, deliciously titled debut effectively plunges its audience into child’s-eye confusion, without the safety net of an omniscient perspective.
Elliptical in its storytelling, but often piercingly precise in its evocation of particular childhood fears and impulses at a multitude of ages, Martínez Bucio’s film won the top prize in the Berlinale’s newly created Perspectives competition for first features — a testament to its slippery singularity of tone and point of view, as well as to the director’s assured guidance of his predominantly young, inexperienced ensemble. The award should boost distributor interest in a commendably thorny, disorienting psychological drama, conceptually akin to Kore-eda’s “Nobody Knows” by way of Erice’s “The Spirit of the Beehive” — not the crowdpleasing coming-of-ager one might expect given its premise and winsome principals.
It opens on a shot of roughly torn photographs being shaped by young hands into an anarchic mosaic of literally fragmented family life. The image teases both the film’s narrative developments and its jagged formal approach, as the director (who shares editing duties with both co-writer Karen Plata and DP Odei Zabaleta) aims to structurally replicate the non-linear disorder and occasional blind spots of ruptured childhood memories. It’s a hazy, muggy summer in Mexico City in the early 1990s, and as the country eagerly awaits the impending Papal visit of John Paul II, the occupants of one claustrophobic house in the suburbs feel they’ve been graced by a less Christian presence. Elderly, addled Romana (Carmen Ramos) warns her grandchildren that the devil is close by, eager to infiltrate their home and their bodies.
Even discounting the threat of satanic invasion, the household is vulnerable. Seemingly plagued by mental health issues, thirtysomething nurse and mother Judith (Micaela Gramajo) has flown the coop, leaving as a parting gift five pairs of new shoes for her children Vanessa (Laura Uribe Rojas), Victor (Donovan Said), Elsa (Mariapau Bravo Avina), Marisol (Regina Alejandra) and Tomas (Rafael Nieto Martinez). Their father Emiliano (Bernardo Gamboa) has left to pursue her, leaving the kids in Romana’s frail, unreliable care. Elder siblings Vanessa and Victor assume what responsibility they can for the younger ones; no one under this roof, however, is much equipped to take care of themselves, let alone others.
None is old enough to skeptically dismiss Romana’s increasingly frenzied doomsaying. Hardly cuddly or nurturing, she’s a remote figure of some terror in her own right, drawing her young wards into her paranoid delusions. Collectively, they retreat from the outside world, the house an insecure cocoon with newsprint covering the windows, and strips of fly-paper hanging balefully from the ceiling. Comic relief comes through the natural, offbeat banter between the siblings — all splendidly and unprecociously played by newcomers — and their peculiar, lateral flights of fancy, including Victor’s earnest attempts to commune with the devil by candlelight.
Some of the murk here is surplus to narrative or atmospheric requirements: It takes some time to separate individual identities and dynamics from the general domestic chaos. Yet for the most part, “The Devil Smokes” deftly evokes its young characters’ incomplete understanding of adult problems. Through what we’re not shown or told, we slowly surmise an air of mental and marital breakdown in which the children have been caught in the cracks. Elsewhere, flashbacks are presented via the medium of home video, glitchily rewound or fast-forwarded at points, with images of grown-up despair accidentally captured in would-be vignettes of familial harmony.
The singed sepia tones favored by Martínez Bucio and Zabaleta may recall sun-faded or ill-developed images from a family album, to the extent that some shots appear edged with film burn, but the effect isn’t one of warm nostalgia. Instead, there’s a vague end-of-days feel to the film’s parched, shadowy visuals, as Zabaleta’s prowling camera renders the layout of the home smaller with each passing minute. In so many such stories of children in crisis, the hovering presence of social services is presented as a threat; here, the authorities may well be letting the light in.
