Sin Nombre

Before setting pen to paper, Sin Nombre writer-director Cary
Fukunaga purportedly rode the rails in the company of real illegal
immigrants traveling from Mexico to the United States. But from the
looks of it, he spent even more time studying Brazilian director
Fernando Meirelles’ slicked-up slum porn City of God: diminutive
kids with guns, carefully lit and art-directed shantytowns and doomed
teen romance. In fairness, Fukunaga’s film isn’t quite as
ostentatiously vulgar as Meirelles’. Its loftier aspirations are
obvious from the opening shot of El Casper (Edgar Flores), a young
initiate in the fact-based Mara Salvatrucha gang, staring fixedly at a
photo enlargement of a leafy wooded landscape — a sign (along
with his teardrop tattoo) that he’s really a soulful poet-dreamer
trapped in a violent existence. After his girlfriend is raped and
murdered by the gang’s more elaborately tattooed leader, Casper makes a
break for it, hopping the same U.S.-bound freight train on which
Honduran teen Sayra (Paulina Gaitan) and her father are heading to the
promised land. Meanwhile, Casper’s best friend, El Smiley (pint-sized
Kristian Ferrer), is dispatched to track the fugitive down —
hmmm, do you think these two amigos will find their personal
loyalty tested? Lushly photographed and meticulously sound-designed,
Sin Nombre is visceral without being vital, researched without
ever seeming lived-in. The best that can be said is that it’s an honest
film on the subject of immigration.