Bound by a shared language and a harsh history, 21-year-old Mexican nanny Lucila (Anna Díaz) defies her surroundings in Madrid. She and her younger brother followed their mother from their hometown in Mexico to live in Madrid. Ashes shares general features with the novel on which it is based (Brenda Navarro’s evocatively titled Ceniza en la boca, or A Bite of Ashes), but even those unfamiliar with the book may notice the haphazard nature of Diego Luna’s adaptation. Too much is pushed to the margins, and the film plays out like a story left between cuts, where the acting shines but the emotional foundations are laid to the contrary.
Some of these sins can often be forgiven for first-time filmmakers, but it’s just that most viewers may not know that this is Luna’s fifth time in the director’s chair. The actor found mainstream success as the lead in the Star Wars spin-off Andor, but back on Earth, his talents behind the camera are unfortunately limited. Perhaps it makes sense to play to his strengths and lead, as Luna himself does here. He knows how to elicit a powerful performance and, more often than not, capture its dimension. Díaz is notable in the lead role, playing a young woman trying to make her way in Spain despite social and legal constraints. Displaying exuberance, curiosity, aggression, sensuality, and ultimately sadness, she brings Lucilla to life in every scene, even when Luna’s other cinematic tools fall short.
I feel something is wrong from the beginning. “Ashes” jumps aimlessly through time, with no moment for its huge developments to land. As soon as Lucila and her brother Diego (Sergio Bautista) are tearfully abandoned by their mother as young children, the Spanish setting takes over the wheel and, without even a half-second of reflection, we plunge headlong into Lucila’s adolescence nearly a decade later. Sure, the cast is skilled enough to incorporate these intimate details into (and underneath) the dialogue, but the details often drop into these empty spaces after long delays. It’s a type of Tetris storytelling that works much more as an intellectual exercise than an emotional one.
Moving between Lucila’s dating life, her job as an au pair, her second job as a food delivery driver, and the Latin American nanny community that forms her social circle, the film leaves little time to fully establish the contours of her family situation. Information flows quickly and economically. Her mother lives with a female partner. Diego gets into trouble at school and ends up being taken care of by Lucilla, but there is little richness in this depiction of a broken family. There’s rarely a “what” or “why” about what happens in this regard, and even when major developments occur, the impact rests squarely on Diaz’s shoulders, and her reactions suggest possibilities over time that we might have to spend a lot of time looking into before we find out what’s really going on. And while the movie tails off between various plot points, each one is given the same importance as Lucilla playing ping-pong. “And then, and then…”
Luna has the right instincts within a limited storytelling framework and really draws the camera to Diaz, but this happens partly because he doesn’t seem to know where else to put the camera. Lucilla’s mother (Adriana Paz) ends up being captured in a kind of non-committal semi-presence, commanding the camera to be unable to determine whether she exists within the frame, outside the frame, or on its periphery, robbing the film of the potential power of its framing and cuts to and from Lucilla.
Ultimately, when we find Lucilla returning to Mexico for a melancholy family gathering, the second half of the third act veers into a story about how the idea of ”home” changes, just like humans, but the malformation of both of its main locations makes it too disconnected, both tonally and visually, to build any worthwhile bridges between events and places. How Lucila gets here physically and logistically is intuitive enough, but the emotional journey this journey takes her on is left too vague to have any meaningful impact, even though Díaz might conjure up a great life in the film’s imitation of living in the margins.
