File Under: I’m at the fucking Houston airport, George Bush International (natch) and doing this instead of going into The Fox News Channel Store.
Author: Elliot
Hay Aub, long time no hear from. This is going to have to be one of those where I only review one film because I feel so compelled. Aside from a few compulsory yawners (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek) this is the one that's still kept a grip on me, and it's been a week since I've seen it. I know you heard me rant about this movie while you were enjoying the many benefits bestowed upon you by The Haunting In Connecticut, or while you were brazenly chatting about how excited you are for Chris Columbus’ adaptation of the Nobel Prize winning I Love You, Beth Cooper, but I wanted to grant my reader(s?) the chance to hear about it as well. After reading your (surprising) criticism of Gomorra I honestly think that you'll be pleasantly surprised with this one.
I’ve come to realize it’s categorically appropriate that I was first introduced to the film Sin Nombre as a trailer in waiting for the film Gomorra. You may have read my fragment on the latter, a wondrous if not perilous chronicling into the world of organized crime in Italy as various factions brutally struggle for vast sums of money in a land where destitution created by such endeavors rules the day. Despite many glaring parallels between these two films, the stark contrast with Sin Nombre is not that it’s a struggle for money, it’s a struggle for local authority and for the self-preservation of life.
Not knowing very much Spanish, myself, I had to generously suspend much of my disbelief in regard to the dialogue as I simply find it hard to believe that the levels of indoctrination foretold here can have such an all-encompassing cognitive effect as to use the word “homey” so seriously and so often, but then again I also have an understanding of said indoctrination as to believe that a nine year old would shoot his only genuine friend to death in order to gain recognition amongst his gang’s higher ups for fear of losing his life as well. I’m sure there was some Spanish equivalent they were using that has just as much of a laughable effect; goes to show you how much I actually know about thug lyfe.
The story begins, innocently enough, with a young man in Mexico around the age of sixteen or so named Willy, nicknamed Casper (played with such careful and wistful beauty by Edgar Flores it was often difficult to think that he was just acting) by the gang to which he belongs: MS-13; being the gang of Salvadorian descent which has been well known to infiltrate the United States after requiring refugee status as a result of a decades long civil war. MS-13 is widely known as one of the most far-reaching and violently dangerous illegal organizations in the western world. This film subtly yet wonderfully details that participation is not necessarily the choice of the participant, and if it is then the other choice is likely to live in fear of another sort. Casper has a young friend named Smiley who does jobs for MS, mostly petty theft of small electronics to sell for cash. As it turns out that Smiley does such a good job for the gang, the leader of the local faction, known as Lil’ Mago (a decisively brilliant and psychopathic Tenoch Huerta Mejía) decides that it’s time the youngster be initiated into the gang by being beaten in for 13 very long seconds, innocently enough. Lil’ Mago is played with such an intense psychopathic tenacity by Mejía that he easily reminds one of a tyrant running an entire nation as opposed to a local, if not per capita violent, gang.
The second tier of the story is one that is less chilling, yet paradoxically more distressing about a Honduran girl named Sayra, whose father has reappeared for the first time in (what is gleaned) a very long time, in order to illegally transport her to New Jersey in hopes of a more prosperous life in a more prosperous surrounding, (he must not be familiar with Jersey).
Without giving too much away, the two primary story lines have Sayra and Casper meeting in auspiciously redemptive circumstances in which Casper must decide to leave the gang which has appropriated much more loyalty than it has given, a task not exactly smiled upon by his contemporaries. What follows is a thriller, love story and drama that on the surface is supposed to morally eschew the practices and beliefs of gang activity, but underneath acknowledges its ubiquity and is a coming of age story in the all too familiar epoch of immigration, an age reached much too soon for all parties involved, that doesn’t pander to the tacky throwbacks and pitiful sentimentality of most coming of age stories.
Initially I was perplexed and even a little perturbed by the complete lack of authority other than that within MS-13; being either parental or municipally commissioned authority figures. However, after brief analysis I have come to acknowledge that any sort of parental or official authority is not only superfluous in a film of this scope, but is necessarily non-existent in reality as well. As this chronicle of death and disparity is foretold, we are sucked into a world that is not only genuinely terrifying but uniquely understated within contemporary American cognition, and I can’t get enough of it.
Aubrey, I also can’t even begin to tell you how beautifully discordant the bombastic, yes, beautifully bombastic score was. It was audible dissonance to the visually disturbing, my Sonny to your Cher, your mom to my dad, I really think you’re gonna like it and I certainly hope that I haven’t blown it up too much for you here.
How was Haunting? Are we gonna quit our jobs and go wait in line for two weeks for Harry Potter and the Suspiciously Incestuous? How about this week’s J.J. Abrams helmed Star Trek, you in?
Elliot.
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