Although The Burning Plain is Guillermo Arriagas' directorial debut, as the fourth in a series of non-linear films he has scripted, it too is very much about the interconnectedness of life. Throughout the film the story jumps back and forth between several different stories and groups of characters which, as you would be right to expect from Arriagas' previous films, are somehow related. As in his other films, at play are both relationships between those as close family and those who did not know each other at all before the events in the story are set in motion. Drawing on themes used in all his previous stories, not only defining the story but the characters themselves are the intricacies and complications of love, betrayal, and guilt. As the film's tagline states: "Love heals. Love absolves. Love burns." And while we see a bit more of the burn than anything else, in the end, the final message is one about a love that, even when it burns, has the power of a fire that heals instead of consumes.

In New Mexico, we watch as the love between a mother (Kim Basinger) and daughter (Jennifer Lawrence) is turned to pain and confusion when the daughter discovers that her mother is cheating on her father. In Oregon, a grown woman (Charlize Theron) almost blends into the dark skies that surround her as she stares into the distance with a constant look of pain and offers her body to everybody from her married cook to a kind stranger who gives her a ride home.

After the death of her mother and his father, a young woman unable to overcome the mix of pain, grief, and guilt associated with her knowledge of the affair and a young man more interested in understanding the love his father shared with her mother find themselves pulled together in their parents' absence. Throw in an additional character/storyline or two and eventually bring them all together to comprise the same, and what you are left with is both a cautionary warning about the tendency of pain and betrayal to reach across both generations and time and a hopeful reminder that a love that is true can heal even the most broken relationships and offer restoration to the most damaged hearts.

First—the brokenness. Its two main players—Mariana, the oldest daughter of the cheating mother, and Sylvia, the dark Oregonian who obviously has something in her past. Through Mariana, we see the many different kinds of building blocks that can lead to so much of the brokenness we see around us. In Sylvia, we see that pain and brokenness after it has been allowed to reign for who knows how long. When Mariana first discovers her mother's infidelity, we see an internal rift already forming in her questioning and confusion of the notion of family and love she has always believed in and that which she sees before her. After her mother dies and she enters into a relationship with Santiago (J.D. Pardo), the son of her mother's lover, we continue to see the struggle between the rule of pain and love as Mariana both reaches out for the warmth of Santiago's embrace and cuts and burns herself without even blinking. And, while we do not discover the exact source of Sylvia's pain until later, as she also cuts herself, engages in sex with a near acknowledgment that she is just being used, and pushes anyone away who tries to get any closer or offer her anything better, we see what it looks like when pain has won.

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