Maria Full of Grace.

Produced by Becky Glupczynski; written and directed by Joshua Marston; original music by Leonardo Heiblum and Jacobo Lieberman; cinematography by Jim Denault; editing by Anne McCabe and Lee Percy; production design by Debbie DeVilla; starring Catalina Sandino Moreno, Gullied Lopez, Yenny Paola Vega, Patricia Rae, Osvaldo Plasencia, Orlando Tobon, John Alex Toro, and Wilson Guerrero. Color, 101 mins. A Fine Line Features release.

Joshua Marston's first feature follows Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a young, pregnant, recently dismissed factory worker in Colombia, as she impulsively embraces the opportunity to become a New York-bound drug 'mule.' Although the film presents a narrative of the drug trade from a female smuggler's point of view, a perspective absent from mainstream products like Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000), Maria Full of Grace is largely the story of an immigrant's pilgrimage. The journey of seventeen-year-old Maria is really an escape from unemployment, an exploitative family, and the prospect of a loveless marriage.

Writer-director Joshua Marston, a thirty-five-year old graduate of NYU Film School, spent years in Colombia and among Colombian immigrants in Queens, New York, acquiring both knowledge of the community and a feeling for cinema verite. For the most part, the film is shot in a documentary style using many nonprofessional actors, with the camera lingering for several seconds before and after the dramatic action, which effectively establishes a sense of Maria's environment and her character. Marston's swift editing and skillful pacing make up for his somewhat static, slightly withdrawn camera. The film's dynamism derives almost entirely from the vigor and willfulness of its main character, who appears in almost every shot. Having interviewed hundreds of women for the role, and, having found the perfect match in Catalina Sandino Moreno, Marston often simply allows her to lead his camera. Moreno, an advertising student from Bogota in her first film role, has unblemished, refined features that might possibly distinguish her from the provincial character she plays. Yet with the subtle expressiveness of faint astonishment at life around her, and sometimes rebellious dismay, Moreno imbues Maria's character with a perfect mixture of apprehension and daring.

Gorgeous and vivacious, Maria is from a small town, but she might well be from any of the myriad places in the developing world offering young women little beyond foreclosed opportunities. In a kinetic scene early in the film, we see Maria, her long black hair entangled by the wind, climbing to the rooftop of an abandoned building at the outskirts of her town. Evading the clumsy kisses of her sullen boyfriend Juan (Wilson Guerrero), she mounts with determination to "go up there, above," to reach "somewhere else." What in a different movie might have been a call for adventure, here becomes a young woman's instinctive insight into the limitations of her environment that few around her perceive.

In the factory where she works with eighty-four other women dethorning roses, Maria becomes the only one to maintain a prickly attitude: she stands up to her oppressive boss and eventually resigns, not liking "how they treat me." At home three generations of fatherless families await--her grandmother's, mother's, and sister's. Her mother's face has grown severe, and her unmarried, unemployed sister's evokes the feminine hysteria of an ancient Greek drama mask. These well-cast female roles work in counterpoint to Maria's character. We learn how the family depends on Maria for financial and levelheaded emotional support. In one scene, for instance, she advises her sister to obtain medical care for her ill child rather than using medicinal teas. And her best friend Blanca (played with cheerful, feisty charm by Yenny Paola Vega) relies on Maria for guidance in her love life. When Maria informs her rather shiftless boyfriend Juan that she is pregnant, in a scene played with cold candor, they both realize they stand poised to live lives forever fixed.

Thus, about twenty-five minutes into the film, Maria is on her way to Bogota in search of employment and a different life. She hitches a motorcycle ride with Franklin (John Alex Toro), a recent acquaintance. An eager flatterer and a dexterous schemer who makes up in energy what he lacks in charm, Franklin recruits daring, desperate women as 'mules' or drug carriers. The income they gain from even one trip to the U.S. "can buy a house" in Colombia, but the tradeoff is enormous: not only a prison sentence if apprehended, but also a certain death if the swallowed drug pellets explode in the stomach. Marston wisely refrains from halting the already elliptical narrative here or lingering upon any hesitation Maria may experience--the audience is not given a chance to dwell on Maria's fate.

After she quickly accepts the offer, Marston's cinematography examines the drug operation in close-up, as if in a made-for-TV documentary, revealing the tidy precision of the drug dealer's work--the epitome of Western-capitalist professionalism. Maria and other female 'swallowers' arrive dressed for a white-collar job, with the pleasant, fatherly drug lord shown in a crisp white shirt, and workers wearing white plastic gloves as they prepare pellets of cocaine the women will swallow. The only purity here, however, is the innocence of the young female 'swallowers' about to be irrevocably stolen. One of them, Lucy (Gullied Lopez), a beautiful unfulfilled woman with sad eyes, becomes Maria's mentor and guide.

In his book, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1983), anthropologist Michael Taussig describes the usage of money in fertility rites among exploited Colombian peasants in Cauca Valley and, in another study, among poor Bolivian miners. Taussig explains how, in these rites, workers propitiate 'the devil' (in his interpretation, the mine or plantation owner) with currency, asking for fertile lands and plentiful ore. In Maria Full of Grace, a similarly alarming motif is invoked in connection with religion and the economics of the drug trade. Pregnant Maria's 'holy communion' becomes the pellet of cocaine which will take her to an uncertain future in America, a land of "many more opportunities." A 'blasphemous' critique might be inferred from these scenes when an elegant, pimplike drug lord gazes at the anesthetized Maria as he drops capsules in her plate or as he stands above her, adjusting the drugs in her stomach.

With a cynical camera eye, Marston films drug dealers, now in New Jersey, listening to a TV documentary about Latinos and the Catholic faith in the U.S., and even has one kiss his cross. In contrast is a scene set in Queens, where Maria and Lucy's pregnant sister Carla (Patricia Rae) discuss immigration against the background of a miniature wall engraving of the Virgin Mary. Carla also has a shrine for the Virgin in her living room adorned with offerings. Marston treats Maria and Carla's joy in prospective motherhood respectfully, his target not so much religion as the fetishism of profit and the abuse of young women who undertake extreme risks after passing devilish initiation rituals of the drug trade. When we hear Lucy--who continues transporting drugs at high personal cost, even though she no longer appears to need the income--describe America as a world "too perfect," where "everything is straight," we wonder how she ended Lip so brainwashed, so unable to evaluate her options in either Colombia or the U.S.

In the ten minute sequence of Maria's drug swallowing initiation, she appears to age ten years her innocence lost. Her hair is let down; she is dressed in blue and black, set against orange walls that bear a large poster of an angelic-looking child. Positioning the camera in the far left corner, Marston shows us Maria as she washes her face aim examines her reflection in a mirror. Sine is long past the point of no return, but Marston pauses, dwelling on her character. When she is apprehended and interrogated at New York's JFK airport, even as she lies to inspectors whom Marston depicts as decent and conscientious, we desperately want her to escape, to reach her heaven. In an Upper West Side cinema in Manhattan, where a previous showing of the film was sold out, the audience included Latin American families with teenage children; during the scene of interrogation, the theater tensed and then sighed with relief when Maria was allowed to pass (she could not undergo an X-ray because of her pregnancy).

Maria Full of Grace resonates primarily as a New York immigration story. As in Stephen Frears's clever Dirty Pretty Things (2002), Julie Bertucelli's accomplished, beautifully acted Since Otar Left (2003), or even Claire Denis' tender I Can't Sleep (1994), we watch young women emigrating to Western cities alone. This is perhaps less an echo of feminist liberation around the world than testimony to the growing number of responsibilities women have taken over in their home countries without corresponding reward. The theme explored by all three films--of female bodies crossing borders--offers more complex understandings of sexuality as well. Shame or humiliation for the female characters depicted in these films has less to do with the sex act and more, as Maria shrewdly understands at seventeen, with how they are being treated in the workforce or by their partners.

While avoiding simplistic victimization plots, these films, however, point clearly to the exploitation, abuse, and mistreatment of foreigners. In Dirty Pretty Things, the bodies of immigrants of both genders are for sale in a literal and sinister sense. Only for a brief moment, when drugs explode in Lucy's body, does Maria Full of Grace become as bloody as the scenes of kidney extractions in Dirty Pretty Things. We learn that Lucy's body was butchered to extract the drugs but Marston wisely avoids showing the gore. His Maria also has what Frears' film doesn't--the authenticity of Catalina Sandino Moreno, quite unlike the artificiality of Audrey Tautou in her conveying of an alluring naivete. Frears's film in turn is more successful in craftily twisting the narrative around a theme of poignant yet uneasy multinational immigrant solidarities in London. Parallels between Maria Full of Grace and Bertucelli's Since Otar Left are also intriguing, as both films use, and at times subvert, similar stereotypes of the immigration narrative: the seemingly casually obtained addresses of relatives or casual acquaintances in Western cities, lies made out of the truths of others, the self-conviction of pride, and small deceptions that become parts of new identities.

In Maria Full of Grace, Marston presents his audience with a documentarylike account of generosity, sharing, and trust among Colombians in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights. Orlando Tobon, a real-life community activist who also served as an associate producer of the film, plays Don Fernando, a local entrepreneur who helps drug 'mule' victims obtain a dignified funeral, and who provides assistance to the surviving 'swallowers' with jobs and housing.

Even more powerful are the scenes in which Marston shows established immigrants extending shelter to newcomers. Carla allows Maria to stay in her apartment even if she isn't really convinced by her story about friendship with Lucy and even though she and her husband are already hosting a cousin in the living room. Blanca, who follows Maria to New York, at one point explains that she had stayed with a "woman she just met in the neighborhood." When Carla elucidates her reasons for remaining in the U.S. to Maria, Marston offers also a glimpse of how one generation of immigrants coaches the next in North American values, and how these new values amalgamate with the old. Marston searches for documentary qualities in all these accounts; as the subtitle on the film's poster proclaims, Maria Full of Grace is "based on 1,000 true stories."

When Maria walks out of JFK airport for the final time, intent on settling, we can make out an advertisement on the wall saying, "It's what's inside that counts." Marston's framing, which includes eager shoppers as they carry home duty-free goods, allows us to contemplate the ironies of this message in light of Maria's having carried both drugs and a baby in her stomach. Virtually identical to the ending of Julie Bertucelli's Since Otar Left, Marston focuses on his heroine's determined, poised face. This, at times, imperfect film of many firsts--a novice actress and a novice writer-director--shows many such forceful and graceful arrivals.