MARIA FULL OF GRACE

-By Lewis Beale

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Seventeen-year-old Maria Alvarez (a luminous Catalina Sandino Moreno) works in a dead-end job at a flower plantation, stripping thorns from rose bushes. After a fight with her supervisor, she quits her job, soon learns that she's pregnant, and breaks up with her boyfriend. On her way into Bogotá to look for work, Maria hooks up with Franklin (Jhon Alex Toro), who suggests that working as a drug mule would be a great way to earn some quick cash. Maria agrees, and soon is immersed in the world of illegal drug smuggling.

After taking some quick lessons from a fellow mule on how best to swallow as many as 70 condoms filled with heroin, Maria performs the necessary task, and is put on a plane to New York. Upon arrival, she's immediately taken into custody by customs officials who feel that, as a woman traveling alone with a large amount of cash, she fits the profile of a drug smuggler. But she convinces them otherwise, and is released.

Maria immediately hooks up with her contacts in New York, who take her and two other mules to a New Jersey motel where they are supposed to pass the drugs, and then get paid. But one of the mules gets sick, probably because one of the packets has burst open in her stomach, and the drug traffickers murder her. Afraid, Maria and her friend Blanca (Yenny Paola Vega) escape with the drugs and make their way to the Colombian community in Queens, where they try to figure a way out of their desperate situation.

Writer-director Joshua Marston's first feature is an astonishing piece of moviemaking, and succeeds on a number of levels. It's a docudrama-like recounting of how the drug trade really works, featuring such fascinating minutiae as how the drugs are packed, transported, etc. Maria Full of Grace also has the tension of a thriller, with the film's young but spunky protagonist getting into and out of horrific situations on what seems like a regular basis. Finally, it works as a human drama, pinpointing why girls like Maria choose to participate in this truly scary business.

Filmed on location in Ecuador and New York, Maria Full of Grace seems vibrant with life and reality. It is also aided by a wonderful cast of Spanish-speaking actors, many of them Colombians, who give the film a real sense of verisimilitude. But looming over them all is Moreno, a lovely newcomer whose performance is a startling mix of vulnerability and strength. Her Maria is practically a template for the economically desperate Hispanic underclass in this country which does the jobs no else wants to do. Which means that in the final analysis, Maria Full of Grace succeeds as both sociology and drama. That's quite an accomplishment.

-Lewis Beale