In Cannes Caméra d’Or winner César Díaz’s second feature, the ‘Artist’ co-star plays a Guatemalan leftist militant desperately trying to raise her estranged son.

The violent shadow of Guatemala’s decades-long civil war looms large over Mexico 86, an intimate political thriller about a family of two trying to stay together as the fight pursues them abroad. Written and directed by César Díaz, whose 2019 Cannes Caméra d’Or winner, Our Mothers, also dealt with the deadly repercussions of the Guatemalan conflict, this engaging if somewhat rote second feature stars Bérénice Béjo (The Artist) as a leftist militant forced to decide between revolution and motherhood.

If Our Mothers was more of a contemplative narrative about the war’s long-term traumatic aftereffects, Mexico 86 hits the ground running and never really lets up. After a prologue, set in Guatemala in 1976, shows activist and recent mother Maria (Béjo) witnessing her husband’s murder by government thugs in broad daylight, we skip 10 years ahead to find her living under cover in Mexico City, where she dons a wig, goes by the name of Julia and works as an editor at a progressive newspaper.

The dilemma recalls the one in Sidney Lumet’s 1988 masterwork Running on Empty, a similar story of family ties and leftist revolutionaries that was made two years after the events in this film are meant to take place. But whereas Lumet’s devastating coming-of-age story provided a major shot to the heart, especially in its portrayal of a teenager trying to crawl out from under his parents’ weighty shadows, Mexico 86 is less emotionally effective overall, and works best during its handful of suspense sequences.

One has Maria receiving a secret dossier about Guatemala’s mass killings only seconds before her contact is stabbed on a crowded street. In another strong scene, she escapes from her apartment with Miguel and Marco, which leads to a car chase with the secret police. When they get caught in a traffic jam, the chase turns into a shootout, with Maria at one point appearing to hold a gun to Marco’s head — a telling sign that she’d rather sacrifice her own child than hand him over to the enemy.

There’s a way out of all this, but it’s a tough one: Maria’s overseeing operative (played by Fermín Martínez from Narcos: Mexico) tells her she can send Marco off to a “hive” in Cuba, where he’ll be raised with other children of the revolution in relative safety. But the bond between mother and son seems to be tightening, despite some rocky moments, and Maria clearly doesn’t want to give up either Marco or the bigger battle.

The film’s title refers to the 1986 World Cup, which took place in Mexico and which is never referred to except in a few perfunctory moments. The greater backdrop to the story is what happened in Guatemala during the dark years of its many dictatorships, including a genocide in the early ’80s that lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. If anything, Diaz succeeds in conveying how fatal the conflict in his homeland truly was, making its way into foreign lands and tearing loving families apart.