Melodrama with rewarding end

Mexico's Guillermo Arriaga, who made his mark as a writer with his magnificent screenplays for Alejandro González Iñárritu's 21 Grams and Babel, makes his directoring debut with The Burning Plain, a complex, draining character study.

Stamped with Iñárritu's influence, Plain is a fragmented tale about the emotionally fragmented that snakes in and out of three seemingly separate story lines.

A classic psychological melodrama about thwarted desire, failed relationships, and unrealized dreams, it delivers stellar turns from Charlize Theron, Joaquim de Almeida, and Kim Basinger, and a breakout performance by the remarkably radiant 18-year-old Jennifer Lawrence.

Arriaga opens on a barren desert landscape. In the distance, a small trailer is consumed by raging flames.

The fire kills an adulterous couple (Basinger and de Almeida) who used the trailer for their assignations. Later, Arriaga fills in the details of the ill-fated romance and its effect on the lovers' families, turned enemies by the fire.

Eventually, a new, equally conflict-ridden, yet happier love emerges from the ashes.

Cut to a bedroom in a cold, gray-blue city and to Sylvia (Theron), whose emotional barrenness matches the cold rain outside her window.

Sylvia is an intelligent, beautiful, successful restaurateur. Yet she's gripped by anxiety and depression. She spends much of her time trying to erase herself with meaningless sexual encounters and cutting herself.

Is she mourning a lost love?

In one scene, Sylvia sits on the rocks overlooking a stormy ocean. She squeezes a stone in her hand.

In the third plotline, a Mexican crop duster (Danny Pino), who almost dies in a crash, tries to track down his daughter's mother, who deserted them both shortly after giving birth. The little girl burns with anger, curiosity, and frustrated desire over her mother.

It's clear Arriaga knows his Freud. His first parable reveals that desire in its purest form is an inhuman force that consumes everything, regardless of morality or the drive for self-preservation.

Conversely, Sylvia's emotional implosion illustrates the death drive that grips us when our fundamental need for love is denied by external forces or inner conflicts.

The viewer's patience is eventually rewarded when Arriaga wraps up the film's multidimensional story. Its fragments converge perfectly, like puzzle pieces.

Guilt is uncovered, emotional hang-ups addressed, and meaning restored to life.

Plain is an intelligent, deeply felt film. But it almost buckles under its emotional weight and psychoanalytic ambitions.

And for a film that grapples with the sheer messiness of life and the conflicting desires that can drive us to love - or to death - Plain does have an impossibly neat, uncomplicated ending.

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