The Burning Plain

The Burning Plain is a 2008 American drama film directed and written by Guillermo Arriaga and starring Charlize Theron, Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Basinger and Joaquim de Almeida. In Arriaga's directorial debut, he films a story that has multipart story strands woven together as in his previous screenplays. Filming of The Burning Plain began in New Mexico in November 2007, and the film was released in late 2008 in various festivals, before a limited theatrical release in 2009. The film was a critical and commercial failure. Plot Typical of Arriaga's works, this film is told in a nonlinear narrative, where events are revealed out of sequence. The following plot summary is in chronological order, thus does not reflect the exact sequence of the events as seen on screen. The story starts some time during the mid-1990s in a small town near Las Cruces, New Mexico (close to the border with Mexico), where Gina, a wife and mother to four children, is introduced. Gina is having an affair with a local man named Nick Martinez, who also has a family of his own, but unbeknownst to the two, Gina's teenaged daughter Mariana finds out about their love affair. Mariana follows her mother to Nick's trailer. Knowing the two are inside, and in an effort to make them end their affair, she disconnects the gas pipe leading into the trailer and sets it on fire. The flames eventually reach a gas tank, which explodes, consuming the entire trailer and claiming Nick and Gina's lives, although Mariana had no intention of killing either of them. After Gina and Nick's funeral, Mariana and Nick's son, Santiago, slowly begin to develop a relationship of their own. Mariana soon becomes aware that she is pregnant with Santiago's daughter. The two flee to Mexico amid disapproval from their families and decide to have the baby there; after she gives birth to their daughter, Mariana abandons her family and changes her name to Sylvia. More than a decade later, Sylvia is working at a high-end restaurant in Oregon. Despite her success, she does not have any stable relationships but only casual encounters, and has persistent thoughts of suicide. Here, a mysterious man follows her around. It is Carlos, a close friend and business partner of Santiago. After an accident involving their crop-dusting plane, the hospitalized Santiago urges Carlos to look for Sylvia, for whom Santiago has been searching since she abandoned him and their two-day-old daughter.