It’s perhaps unfortunate for the novelist and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, Babel, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) that he was labelled as something of a one-trick pony even before he stepped behind the camera to direct his first film. No matter that the “trick” with which he made his career was as sophisticated and stylish as a Vegas magician’s show-stopping climax. Once the audience becomes wise to the workings of an illusion, even the most polished showman might as well be a street-corner hustler palming coins and shuffling cards.

The problem is that Arriaga’s way of telling stories has become familiar through his collaborations with Alejandro González Iñárritu, his fellow Mexican. Arriaga’s distinctive style has always involved nonlinear narrative and temporal jumps and seemingly disparate parallel story lines which are miraculously threaded together through a chance event, usually an accident of some kind. It’s a technique to which he returns for The Burning Plain, his directorial debut, an elegantly structured tale of lives laced together with tragedy and guilt. But for the rush of recognition that greets the story structure, it’s actually rather good. It lacks the relentless bleakness that leached the life out of 21 Grams and the portentousness that irritated many critics in Babel.

Charlize Theron takes the central role – if there can be a central role in a story that spreads itself across decades and borders. The manager of an upmarket restaurant in a rainy, unnamed North American city, she masks the mess within her soul with a patina of well-groomed professionalism and a series of numb and joyless sexual trysts.

Meanwhile, in the border country of New Mexico, a housewife and mother of four (Kim Basinger) tentatively embarks on an affair with a gentle, loving man who makes her feel whole and beautiful. Her teenage daughter has guessed her mother’s secret and the betrayal she feels grows like cancer. Her own misguided romance is a direct reaction to her mother’s. The final piece in the puzzle is a Mexican girl forced by her father’s accident to seek the mother who abandoned her at two days old.

It’s a quality production. Theron’s performance stands out – the force of her self-loathing hits the audience like a blow – and Arriaga has chosen his collaborators well. The director of photography is Robert Elswit, who already demonstrated with There Will Be Blood an eye for intimate details within epic landscapes; Hans Zimmer (The Dark Knight) crafts a low-key but effective score. Arriaga has acquitted himself with a film that certainly deserves an audience. Whether it finds one is another matter.

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