The Burning Plain: Family Values

The Burning Plain, which is directed by Alejandro
González Iñárritu’s writer, Guillermo Arriaga (he
wrote Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel), opens
with a sequence that presents us with the target of the film’s
attack—the family. After passionless sex with a man who, we later
learn, is a chef at her fancy seaside restaurant, Sylvia (Charlize
Theron) rises from the sheet-messy bed and walks to an ugly window. She
is naked and her flesh is as cold as the morning light. She opens the
curtain, looks out the window, and sees low-hanging clouds, dreary
drizzle, downtown Portland, and a family (mother and children) walking
down a path in a city park. The children and mother look up and see raw
nakedness—but Sylvia’s body is not sexy or sensual but scornful.
Only the hand of the horniest pervert in the park could extract a drop
of pleasure from that icy vision at the top of the town house. Sylvia
makes no effort to move away from the window or attempt to cover her
privates, but instead viciously intensifies the beam of her nakedness
on the family. The mother is finally forced to cover the eyes of the
vulnerable children. This is not an act of indecency (like a flasher in
a raincoat) but an act of cruelty that has its roots deep within the
character. The film’s plot is essentially a journey to that root, that
moment in the past when Sylvia, a girl, saw something unspeakable. From
that moment on, she would hate the family, men, and sex, which, as the
French philosopher pointed out in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, has its birthplace and early development
within the closed circle of the family. Ultimately, The Burning
Plain, which is as measured and lugubrious as 21 Grams,
defends an extramarital affair and denounces two marriages. The affair
is filled with love, and the marriages are empty (on one side, the wife
is a drunk; on the other side, the husband is impotent). The director’s
point? The family can only bring death to sex.