Bound by a common language and torrid history, 21-year-old Mexican nanny Lucila (Anna Diaz) bristles against her surroundings in Madrid, where she and her younger brother followed their mother from their Mexican hometown. “Ashes” shares these broad strokes with the novel on which it’s based — Brenda Navarro’s evocatively titled “Ceniza en la boca,” or “A Mouthful of Ash” — but even those unfamiliar with the book might still be tipped off to the haphazard nature of Diego Luna’s adaptation. The film plays out like a tale where too much has been relegated to the margins and left between the cuts, where the performances shine but their emotional foundations have been laid in reverse.
First-time filmmakers can usually be forgiven some of these sins, only most viewers might not realize that this is Luna’s fifth go in the director’s chair. The actor has found tremendous mainstream success as a fixture of “Star Wars” spin-off “Andor,” but back on Earth, his talents behind the camera have unfortunate limitations. Perhaps it might make sense to lead with his strengths, as Luna himself does here: He knows how to elicit a powerful performance, and more often than not, how to capture its dimensions. Diaz is remarkable in the leading role, as a young woman trying to make her way in Spain, despite social and legal constraints. Exhibiting exuberance, curiosity, aggression, sensuality and eventually grief, she breathes life into Lucila at every turn, even when Luna’s other cinematic tools fall short.
From the very beginning, something feels amiss. “Ashes” skips aimlessly through time, with nary a moment to let the enormity of its developments land. No sooner are Lucila and her brother Diego (Sergio Bautista) tearfully abandoned by their mother as children than the Spanish setting takes the wheel, thrusting us quickly and headfirst into Lucila’s young adult life nearly a decade later, without even half a second’s worth of reflection. Granted, the cast is skilled enough to work these intimate specifics into (and beneath) their conversations, but the details are often dropped into these empty spaces after long delays, a kind of Tetris storytelling that works far more as an intellectual exercise than an emotional one.
Moving between Lucila’s dating life, her job as au pair, her second gig as a food delivery driver, and the community of Latin American nannies that forms her social circle, the film is left with little time to fully establish the contours of her family situation. Information is sprung quickly and economically — her mother lives with a female partner; Diego acts troubled at school, forcing Lucila to look after him — but there’s little richness to this depiction of a fractured home. There’s seldom a “what” or “why” to what transpires in this regard, and even when major developments occur, their impact rests on Diaz’s shoulders, as her reactions work overtime to suggest possibilities that we might have to sift through for lengthy periods before we know what’s really happening. And so the film trails off between various plot points, each given equal importance as Lucila ping-pongs between them. “And then, and then, and then…”
Luna has the right instincts within his limited storytelling framework, in that he practically lets his camera gravitate towards Diaz, but this happens in part because he doesn’t seem to know where else to put it. Lucila’s mother (Adriana Paz) ends up captured with a kind of noncommittal semi-presence, commanding a camera that can’t seem to decide if she exists within the frame, outside it, or on its margins, robbing the film’s framing, and its cuts to and from Lucila, of their potential power.
Eventually, as we find Lucila back in Mexico for a melancholy family gathering, the late third-act swerve, towards a tale of how the idea of “home” changes just as much as people, ends up too tonally and visually disconnected to form a worthwhile bridge between events, and between places, since both its primary locales are malformed. How Lucila gets here physically, and logistically, is intuitive enough, but the emotional journey this trip takes her on is left too vague to make a meaningful impact, as much as Diaz might conjure great life from within the film’s simulacrum of living on the margins.
