A Film Canon

This haunting film elegantly interrogates Mexico's Pre-Columbian mythologies, taking their quintessential image - the floating gardens of Xochimilco - as the province of an allegory that centres on the eponymous heroine's (Dolores del Rio) attempt to survive an equally hostile Indian and Spanish population, the one decrying her as an untouchable, the other withholding quinine for a few extra pesos. Along with several spectacular crowd sequences that anticipate the Revolution to come - or, alternatively, envisage it as an extrapolation of anarchic religious ceremony - this construes Mexican identity as a contested space, or no- man's-land, analogous to the surface of the river that provides Maria with her flowers, and upon which most of the action takes place. Nevertheless, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa ensures that this unease also informs that surface, imbuing it with a hyperbolic stillness that allows it to be completely perpendicular with the poplars against which it is set, as well as completely continuous with Maria's lustrous skin, thereby explicating its artificial, fantastic qualities. Hence Fernandez' use of a framing device in which an artist tortuously questions his methods and motivations for representing Maria, giving the lie to his insistence that "Painting is not as difficult as one supposes. I just paint what I see: Mexico".