Sin Nombre
Dir: Cary Joji Fukunaga
Rating: 3.5
Focus Features
96 Minutes
Sin Nombre is an ambitious hybrid: a Sundance-nurtured, socially conscious film in the form of studio genre entertainment. It combines chase, gangster and tragic western movie elements with the plight of Central American immigrants as they make their way across Mexico toward the U.S. border. El Norte paved the way for recent concerned liberal films such as The Visitor and Frozen River and deserves credit for being one of the first films to engage American cinema in a discourse on the immigrant experience. However, unlike Sin Nombre, its approach to the material is shallow, condescending, and hectoring, which undermines its attempt at brutal realism. El Norte has loads of good intentions, but intentions are one thing; good filmmaking is another entirely. Fortunately for us, Sin Nombre’s political statements are born from the narrative and the immigrants here are allowed to be real people, as opposed to movie people that try to shove Very Important Ideas down our throats.
Sin Nombre follows two story lines. Teenager Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) is reunited with her father who has been deported and wants to take her and his brother back with him. They embark on the arduous journey across Mexico and on to the Texas border en route to New Jersey, using the tops of train cars as their means of overland transportation. The other plot is an exploration of the dominant gangs in Central America, where young gang-banger Casper (Edgar Flores) introduces 12-year old Smiley (Kristyan Ferrer) to the hard-core Mara Salvatrucha syndicate with an initiation beating ordered by jefe Lil’ Mago (Tenoch Huerta Mejía).
The two stories collide when Lil’ Mago decides to test Casper’s loyalty at the Tapachula train yard, where Sayra and her family get on a northbound freight. With Smiley in tow, the gangsters rob the migrants riding atop the train. When Lil’ Mago tries to assault Sayra, Casper’s repressed rage boils over, and he fatally slashes his boss’s neck with a machete. He throws the body from the train, and sends Smiley back to the gang, a decision that soon has the members of Mara Salvatrucha on his trail, with Smiley himself vowing to avenge Lil’ Mago’s murder.
Fukunaga’s thoroughly researched particulars and cultural details, many of which will be evident only to Spanish-speaking viewers, pay off on the screen. He traveled repeatedly to Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Border police officers and social workers put him in touch with gang members, both in prison and on the streets, who are involved in immigrant smuggling. He visited the train yards where the immigrants gather and wait to hop on the trains at night, and the shelters that housed those who were injured on the journey. The gritty, unsentimental scenes about gang culture are both fascinating and horrifying to watch and, while the violence is brutal and unpleasant, it never seems unnatural, gratuitous or manipulative.
Sin Nombre flounders when it departs from the specifics of its unique world in favor of more conventional genre execution. Nonetheless, aside from a handful of flashy stylistic choices, such as the moody crane shots used on the nocturnal train yard sequences that call attention to themselves, Fukunaga clearly exhibits a flair for confident, spirited storytelling and command of the film medium. By far, the most thrilling scenes take place on top of the train, which the director rode three times during his two-year research period. He favors documentary-style camerawork and knows the value of straightforward, beautifully composed shots. The simple image of hundreds riding on top with garbage bags over their heads to keep out the rain with the beautiful Mexican countryside in the background is more powerful than any fancy Hollywood camera trick.
Fukunaga assumes his audience is familiar with the horrors that drive people out of their native countries, at least as they’ve been trivialized in abominations such as Blood Diamond. He avoids predictability and sermonizing by focusing on gang warfare in Latin America as a type of cannibalistic oppression. Throughout the train ride, Fukunaga evokes the complexity and diversity of public opinions to such flights (Mexicans on the sidelines either shower them with food or stones), but his main interest always remains in the territorially-obsessed nature of being part of a gang. He doesn’t see the gang members’ behavior as rebellion or some affront to civic and national pride but as a compulsion strangely similar to that of the immigrant’s fight to enter a First World capitalist society. From the opening to the last image, Fukunaga seems to understand that life for most immigrants is a broad turf war and one anxious initiation and pledge after another.
by Teri Carson
