Alias Maria | 2015 Cannes Film Festival Review

Guerillas in the Mist: Rugeles Explores the Jungles in Labored Sophomore Effort

An intriguing perspective within a terrifying environment initially makes for a compelling scenario in Alias Maria, the sophomore film from Colombian director Jose Luis Rugeles. We glimpse the internal operations of guerilla warfare within the South American country’s bitter conflict through the eyes of a thirteen year old female soldier as she’s charged with a mission concerning the transport of a leader’s newborn infant son. As intense as something like this may sound, Rugeles pares down the scenario to craft more of a character study. But absent a few sequences of dialogue, the stupor of the protagonist and the numbing repetition of the guerilla’s daily activities tend to make this a chore to sit through.

Maria (newcomer Karen Torres) belongs to a small guerrilla unit of soldiers lodged deep in the Colombian jungle. At the tender age of thirteen, she seems wholly acclimated in a militia of other children and young adults. We briefly glimpse their rituals, involving the female soldiers being forced to undergo abortions should they become pregnant in the jungle, which is something distressing Maria since she is secretly four months pregnant from boyfriend and fellow soldier Mauricio (Carlos Clavijo). But when the commander’s gal is allowed to give birth, Maria is charged with looking after the baby as they escort the child out of the war zone into safety. Paired with other experienced youths, including Byron (Anderson Gomez) and Yuldor (Erik Ruiz), they trek into the landscape on a mission made more precarious due to the baby’s cries. When Yuldor becomes injured, they are forced to reluctantly leave the child in the care of some elders as they bring their comrade to get medical attention. Maria becomes upset at having to abandon the child, already becoming attached to the infant as its caretaker.

The look and tone of Alias Maria feels appropriate, and Sergio Ivan Castano’s cinematography glides over the shadowy forests, capturing the desperation and paralysis of these children forced into military operation. But Rugeles diminishes the most interesting aspects of the narrative, namely the forced abortions amongst the considerable amount of female soldiers (hinting there’s little else to do in-between dodging death). We get little sense of who Maria is or what she wants, other than her obvious wish to avoid an abortion and possible jealousy of the commander’s girlfriend and the privileged position allowing her the freedom to birth. But once they trek off into the jungle on the mission to secure the child’s safety, the narrative slides into a routine neither illuminating nor engaging.

In several respects, Alias Maria recalls Kim Nguyen’s 2012 feature, War Witch in which a fourteen year old girl soldier in Sub-Saharan Africa narrates her life story to the fetus growing inside of her. But Rugeles neglects to craft a similar sense of characterization, and thus Maria seems merely one more apathetic detail in a wasteland of impossibility. It would have helped to supply her with some sort of discernable backstory, but as it stands she may as well have been born into the jungle herself.

Reviewed on May 22 at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival – Un Certain Regard. 91 Mins.

★★/☆☆☆☆☆