The shabby and weird side of impoverished Mexico is brought wonderfully alive with delicate choices of color and lighting and composition, the barking of dogs and crowing of roosters. Prepare for shabby tents and trucks, and lots of rusting junk and odd circus characters somehow wonderfully put on film. The is not a Merchant Ivory film!!! There is some lovely naive or "primitive" art in it in the puppet show for example, and in the trappings of the circus.The young girl is born into an odd community of circus people that are crabby and focused on staying alive.
There is little love or fellowship and she finds it only with her father and ends up getting pregnant by him just before he dies. Then there is nothing for her in the circus and she goes out on her own. She is determined to have the baby because it represents the only love she has ever had.She falls into friendship with a charming little boy that has been taken in by a female preacher and her young son who thinks he is a prophet and free of sin.
The four tour around poor settlements with a visually charming biblical puppet show and the preachers offers to redeem people for their sins and poor gullible peasants place their hopes in her. They donate money of course.People degraded by their conditions and their naivete are shown to be vulnerable to this sort of cheap charisma. I see this as iconic of the exploitations of people in Mexico and elsewhere by wacky religious ideas and a little theatre.The preacher predictably ends up misleading and using the girl for her own selfish and crazy purposes, and the fetus is lost. The preacher of course justifies it as a "greater good" sacrifice for God.In a general way, the ending that follows is not too very hard to guess. The girl seeks revenge. But I won't spoil the plot by going into detail.If you don't take the film literally but instead metaphorically, and if you sometimes wonder why good people do bad things, there is a lot to ponder in this film.
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