Even the most renowned filmmakers are still trying to figure out how to make cinema do and say things that no other artistic medium is capable of doing or saying. Particularly puzzling is the question of whether cinema is better at producing poetic truths or documentary truths. ""Sin Nombre,"" which screened this past weekend at the Play Circle Theater in Memorial Union, seems to suggest that you can't have both poetic and documentary elements in the same film—which, truth be told, is hardly the case.
The film aspires to confront incredibly heavy issues, but it refuses to dwell on any of them in a meaningful way. The pace of ""Sin Nombre"" is a total sprint: Director Cary Jojo Fukunaga's strategy is to show, show and show some more without allowing for much in the way of reflection, contemplation or digestion.
Like so many other contemporary films, ""Sin Nombre"" combines handheld cinematography with cut-happy editing to tell the story of Willy (aka Casper), a member of the notorious El Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha who finds himself fleeing from his former gang aboard a train bound for the U.S.-Mexico border. The train, despite appearing to travel very slowly, manages to cover the length of Mexico in a mere 90 minutes. Willy makes it to the border at about the same time as his absurdly murderous pursuers, typically tragic events result and the viewer walks away feeling bummed out but not exactly stimulated. ""Sin Nombre"" is dead-set on conveying its plot, which is definitely engaging but far too breakneck to grab onto satisfactorily.
Visually, this film is frustrating. Fukunaga's mise-en-scène is very interesting, a field of found objects serving as the setting for the film's high-speed tragedy. It's so interesting, in fact, that one inevitably becomes annoyed by the distractingly shaky framings and blunt image quality. Not much in ""Sin Nombre"" really pops off the screen, which is unfortunate given the visceral intensity of the narrative's subject matter.
""Sin Nombre"" will never be mistaken for a light film; it concerns itself with extremely heavy subjects (gang violence, illegal immigration, revenge, mourning, etc.) from an overtly moral position. However, ""Sin Nombre"" is a highly ethical film with little new to say about moral issues, and at times the sentiments aroused comes off as cliché. It seems to argue that gangs are inherently immoral because they produce horrific acts of violence, many examples of which are shown to get the point across. The condition of the U.S.-Mexico border is criticized because it serves as the ideal site for desperate living and senseless violence; this, too, is unsubtly hammered home through the film's images. The ""showing rather than telling"" phenomenon is certainly a big part of why cinema is so powerful as an artistic medium, but it really helps for a film's form to be provocative or affecting in its own right. ""Sin Nombre"" attempts to tackle weighty things in a way that isn't particularly novel—in other words, the film ""works,"" but ""working"" often isn't enough.
I also didn't care much for the soundtrack, which consists of mildly provocative mood music designed to provide emotional cues for the viewer. If ""Sin Nombre"" is at all melodramatic, it's because this music intrudes so often on the already frenetic presentation of events that the film begins to lose its visual potency and thematic suggestiveness. ""Sin Nombre"" has many poetic and documentary truths that it wants us to see; one only wishes that it didn't try to cram all of them into such a brief block of time.
