Review: Sin Nombre
The California-born Cary Fukunaga was inspired to make Sin Nombre (a.k.a. Without Name) after reading a NY Times article about 90 Central American immigrants trapped and abandoned inside a refrigerated trailer. A gritty tale of the perilous journey taken by immigrants in their bid to cross the Mexico/American border, Cary Fukunaga’s debut film has been lauded with awards from Sundance and Stockholm. The gist of the critics’ praise is that Fukunaga has crafted a “realistic” and “compassionate” tale about the plight of illegal immigrants. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The first act introduces us to the two main characters in parallel narratives. The first is a teenage member of the infamous Mara Salvatrucha gang, Willy, who we see cajole a young friend into taking part in a brutal initiation ceremony and have secret romantic dalliances with a young girl. The second is a Honduran teenage girl, Sayra, who is looking to be reunited with family members in New Jersey. The two are brought together after Willy saves Sayra from being raped by a fellow gang member, inadvertently making himself a fugitive from gang justice.
From here, the film follows a similar trend to other mainstream films on the third world such as Slumdog Millionnaire and District 9, in that the poverty-stricken milieu is a mere trope to appeal to liberal audiences’ sympathies with no kind of in-depth exploration, while the narrative is primarily concerned with repeating the familiar thrills of Hollywood. In the case of Sin Nombre, we are presented with a chase film and a romance. The problem here is that the Hollywood conventions adopted by Fukunaga to encourage the audience to “feel” for the characters actively operate to hinder any understanding of the plight of illegal immigrants.
It’s insulting that a film that proclaims to tell the story of immigrants should focus so heavily on ex-gang member Willy given that Mara Salvatrucha are notorious for robbing immigrants who risk their lives on the train journey depicted in this film, but it’s easy to see why: he offers the audience the thrill of violence and sex plus he looks great in a wife-beater. Willy is like Ryan from Chino with a tan. But his chase narrative sheds no light on the plight of immigrants – their desires, pains, joys, the political situations that set them forth on their journeys. Nor does he provide any real insight into gang culture. He is a screenwriter’s cliché: the sensitive gang-member (he actually has a teardrop tattooed onto his face) whose goodness functions to demonize his fellow Mara Salvatruchans.
By contrast, Sayra, whose background is presumably more familiar to most of the immigrants who ride the trains to the border, is a blank slate. She spends most of the film being ordered around, evincing no kind of personality, until the romantic element forces her (and the audience) to abandon the train to follow Willy who she has apparently struck a bond with. That she decides to follow Willy is just patently ludicrous. Who, with so much at stake, would abandon the wishes of her family and follow a teenage stranger she has witnessed hack a man to death with a machete? No one really, for Sayra really only exists to give the romantic ex-gang member humanity. That is, so that the audience can feel good while feeling for Willy.
Real compassion requires more than feeling, it requires an understanding of the subject of compassion on its own terms. Sin Nombre is incapable of evoking real compassion because it insists that its characters conform to the mainstream audience’s movie-going sensibilities.
Director Cary Fukunaga
The problems that accompany any effort to narritivise third world issues are obviously not lost on Fukunaga who stated in an Indiewire interview:
I felt strange about the possibility of profit on a story about real people risking their lives. I get frustrated with certain filmmakers who stand under a banner of altruism with their socio/political stories that I think sometimes border on the exploitative, often times human interest stories with sensational subjects that often go on to win awards. I guess I feel that the filmmakers had to sacrifice little to make it, and once done, never again revisit the subject but reap all the benefits from others misery.
One can only assume the irony that Fukunaga has moved on to direct an all-star adaptation of Jane Eyre (with Dame Judy Dench, natch) is completely lost on him. Meanwhile, the story of those 90 abandoned immigrants remains untold.
Sin Nombre is available on DVD.
