For a film about tequila, Juan Pablo Gonzàlez’s Dos Estaciones is a sobering watch. Set in the director’s home state of Jalisco in western Mexico, it follows María (Teresa Sànchez), buttoned-up proprietor of the last Mexican-owned tequila factory operating in the highland region. A mood of doom saturates the film, echoed in María’s taciturn face. Lingering shots of the tequila-making process and the red hills bristling with ranks of agave under brooding cloudscapes elegize a way of life that’s all but disappeared. Between the encroachment of foreign corporations and an agave plague, the writing is already on the wall.
As a character study, Dos Estaciones deftly avoids a simplistic portrayal of María. She’s not the cardboard-cutout heroic local-business entrepreneur that a lesser film would turn her into, but a complex, all-too-human presence. Her scrappiness is tempered by ruthlessness. In an early sequence, she walks the factory floor and offers petty criticisms of her workers, more to assert her authority, one senses, than anything else. Later, she cuts the salary of a loyal employee while expressing a dubious concern for his family. To survive as long as she has in the industry, it’s as if she’s had to whittle herself down to a caricature of “the boss.”
At a party, she meets Rafa (Rafaela Fuentes), a young woman who’s recently been laid off from another tequila factory, and hires her on the spot. Rafa has 10 years of experience at every level of the business, but María’s motivation has just as much to do with sexual attraction. She treats her new factotum with a mixture of affection and professional coldness, and the power differential between them is always visible. Still, abortive flashes of tenderness seem to hold out the promise of a freer, happier life. But whether the Catholic mores of rural Jalisco keep María from acting on her feelings, or she has absorbed the machismo of her male counterparts to such a degree that she cannot express them, she yearns and suffers in rigid silence.
In this respect, María’s foil is her trans hairdresser, Tatín (Tatín Vera). The audience comes to learn that, for reasons that Dos Estaciones keeps tantalizingly opaque, María financed Tatín’s business, but over the course of the film, the hairdresser becomes successful enough to strike out on her own. In the glimpse we get of her relationship with a painter named Fernando (José Galindo), she appears comfortable with her gender and sexuality in a way that María, even in her position of relative wealth and power, cannot allow herself to be.
Without this ambiguity to Sànchez’s character and the aspect of personal tragedy that it lends to Dos Estaciones, the film would be too rhapsodic in its depiction of Jalisco. For all its lush cinematography, capturing regional custom and dramatic panoramas alike, this is a film about repression, an inhibition that no amount of tequila can take away.
Unfortunately, Dos Estaciones is held back by its lack of a denouement. After a flood forces the factory to shut down, María performs an explosive act of desperation, and while the abrupt ending allows us to project how the story might have continued, it also works to let María off the hook, in the process inhibiting, rather than encouraging, interpretation.
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