Dos Estaciones (Juan Pablo González, 2022) (Patreon)

Just a quick word about a film that kind of snuck up on me. In its first twenty or so minutes, Dos Estaciones seems pretty familiar. From its rigid compositions to its setting in a small-batch tequila factory, it seemed as though González was making another film, half-doc / half-fiction, about traditions being eradicated by capitalism. And while this is of course an evergreen topic, there are only so many ways to state the problem. In time, Dos Estaciones becomes quite a bit more complicated, and to his credit, González is in no hurry to resolve the contradictions.

Teresa Sánchez, possibly the only professional actor in the film, plays Maria, the owner of an independent tequila business in Jalisco. Dos Estaciones is one of the only remaining manufacturers involved in hand-crafting tequila, since most other factories have been bought out by international distillery corporations. The business is her family legacy, and as the proprietor of one of the only stable employers in the area, Maria is something of a civic leader, respected wherever she goes. Everyone listens to her. She is the boss, and within a business community dominated by men, she is almost regarded as a man herself. Her butch masculinity is never remarked upon by anyone, but tacitly understood.

Where a lesser film would introduce a villain, an outsider trying to put the "dyke" in her place, Dos Estaciones has no such agenda. In fact, Maria's only enemies are crippling debt and, eventually, horrible luck. A pesticide-resistant disease is killing her agave fields, and then, a torrential rain floods the factory. She cannot afford the repairs, so this is the final nail in the coffin for Dos Estaciones Tequila. In public, Maria remains stoic, or occasionally loses her temper. But privately, she cries, and this is a side of herself she will show to no one, especially not Rafa (Rafaela Fuentes), the bookkeeping assistant she's clearly attracted to.

Dos Estaciones is one of the most intelligent treatments of female masculinity I've ever seen. Maria behaves "like a man," in the sense that her sense of self is bound up with success and public stature, and she cannot bear to see those things slip away. At the same time, she is buckling under the emotional weight of being el jefe and living up to her own ideal of butch behavior. As we see in the way the townspeople treat her, or her friend Tatin (Tatin Vera), a trans hairdresser, González is depicting an environment where gender is not anyone's concern. The only person demanding a specific kind of gender presentation is Maria herself, and it's the disruption of that hardbitten identity that is at the core of Dos Estaciones. Self-images are of course very important, but notions of identity will falter in the face of global capital, which may bring us all low in the end.