Maria Full of Grace

Proving that her Oscar nomination for Best Actress was no fluke, Catalina Sandino Moreno gives a natural and very riveting performance as young Colombian Maria who works in a dead-end job for very little with a less-than-understanding boss. What little money she makes is quickly swallowed up in the family income by an unsympathetic mom and sister.

Naturally then the lure of a great deal more lucre through an unsavoury type she meets, is hard to turn down especially when he suggests the job is like a courier. Of course this is playing for high stakes and what she is really being asked to do is fly to America carrying in her stomach small packages of great interest to customs and narcotics officers.

We see Maria learning to swallow plums since they resemble the 40 small packets of heroin wrapped in sausage-like packages that she must take inside her, flying from Bogota to New York. She must also get through customs without being stopped, have a story as back up if she does, and hope that none of them split in her stomach too. No mean feat.

For much of this film, you’re left feeling open-mouthed. This is cinema-realism showing the seedy world of drug trafficking, its Midnight Express without the dramatics and it has one or two twists so don’t expect this to particularly go one way or another from the outset.

Moreno plays Maria as a girl who seizes an opportunity even though she’s not happy having to do what she does, whilst director Marston makes it all not only very believable but also quite tense in many ways largely down to the documentary-style approach and handheld camerawork that he employs. Bridget Jones may have got caught drug trafficking, but the real world is far far different and this film gives you an incling of kind of underground airline traffic that must be going on everyday, exploring every strata of it. A justified Oscar nomination – well done to the Academy for awarding it.

Matt Arnoldi