Cary Fukunaga's SIN NOMBRE: Vicoria para nadie

In Sin Nombre ("Nameless"), Cary Joji Fukunaga's first film, which he both wrote and directed, a doomed, romantic relationship develops between a boy who has broken away from an evil Mexican gang in Chiapas and a pretty girl ("A regular little Selma Hayek," someone calls her) from Honduras. Refusing to go on robbing the migrants hitching a ride atop a freight train, Willy, known in his gang as El Casper (Edgar Flores) saves Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) and attacks another gang member. His pubescent sidekick Smiley (Kristian Ferrer) flees. There are a lot of scenes at the beginning to establish the bestial behavior of Casper and Willy's gangster crew, the Confetti clica of the LA-origin, now international hoodlum organization known as Mara Salvatrucha.

It's a sign of the economic level of Confetti that a major source of livelihood is for them to prey upon poor migrants from Honduras passing through Chiapas on freight trains. Manohla Dargis believes Sin Nobre is saved "from tipping into full-blown exploitation like City of God" by Fukunaga's "sincerity," but she acknowledges that this new film (whose scrawny, heavily tattooed Mexican gangsters simply haven't the panache of Meirelles and Lund's Rio street youths) goes for maximum drama and final uplift and follows narrative arcs not unlike those of 1930 Hollywood studio films about kid hoods. Except there's a big difference from the Thirties in that these are largely inexperienced actors speaking their native Spanish in gritty realistic locations handsomely filmed in 35 mm. by cinematographer Adriano Goldman.

Sayra is with several male relatives, and their story is developed, somewhat more briefly and much less vividly, along with the events in the lives of Casper and Smiley that lead up to their all meeting on the top of the train. Little Smiley is a new gang recruit, and, in scenes just as exploitive and gruesome as anything in City of God if not more so, he is shown being beaten and kicked and then forced to shoot an enemy gang member whose guts are then fed to the dogs. After that initiation, he's somehow still suspected of insufficient loyalty. Meanwhile Casper gets into huge trouble for keeping a secret girlfriend. The gang owns him body and soul so this is considered inexcusable, and ends tragically for him and the girl after the particularly mean and ugly Confetti leader Lil' Mago (Tenoch Huerta Mejia) tries to rape her and she resists. This leads Casper to turn against the gang when he sees another gang member going after Syra atop the train. Then, there's nothing he can do but stay on the trip north, dodging La Migra and helping the Hondurans do so.

Edgar Flores' perpetual tired, sad look and the more experienced Gaitan's resilient prettiness make them a cute tragic couple, though the story has to resort to a fortuneteller's prediction that she'd be saved on the journey by the Devil to explain how she gloms onto the doomed gang youth (the Salvatrucha features Satanic symbols), even with increasing evidence that in fact they're out to get him and he's a marked man for turning against them. However, the simple tragic outline of this doomed romance is somewhat at odds with the vérité aspects of much that has gone before.

Instead of dealing with the whole journey into LA or elsewhere like Gregory Nava's excellent 1983 El Norte, and showing what happens when the immigrants try to make a living in the US, Sin Nombre gets rather hung up on its gang portrait, though still presenting only vignettes of that, and the bonding of Casper (now back to "Willy") and Sayra takes up so much time that the movie ends rather abruptly when a couple people make it into the Estados Unidos. Still, like Joshua Marston of the 2004 Maria Full of Grace (which focused on another pretty Latin girl)-- and both directors are California-born college boys -- Fukunaga has made a vivid film about the dangerous inequities of the US and the Hispanic South and has gained a lot of justified attention for it. Both partake of both good and bad aspects of Sundance. Fukunaga also made the harrowing short film, Victoria para chino, about the 80 Mexican illegals sent north in a sealed freight truck through very hot weather, who arrived in Texas dead. Sin Nombre was co-produced by the ubiquitous Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal.

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