Sin Nombre

The caressing, honeyed light in Sin Nombre beautifies and softens every ugly moment in this equivocating (inspirational yet hard-boiled) story about geographic and moral border crossings. Written and directed by the young American Cary Joji Fukunaga making his feature debut, the film comes with a veritable certificate of authenticity: it was shot in Mexico and is performed in Spanish by Latin American actors. The credits are also in Spanish, including the information that the project was "developed with the assistance of the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program," an acknowledgment of its truer, more complex provenance.

In brief, Sin Nombre - "without name" in Spanish - tracks two parallel journeys that inevitably meet, brought together after a fatal encounter. The first, by far liveliest voyage begins in the chaos of Tapachula in Chiapas, Mexico, where Casper (Edgar Flores), a teenage member of the vicious street gang Mara Salvatrucha, is making a fast run toward an early grave. Casper meets his destiny when his story collides with that of Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a solemn-eyed, none-too-sharp Honduran teenager who is riding the rails to Texas with her father and uncle. The teenagers meet cute, gangsta style, when another Salvatrucha member attacks her during a heist on the train and is assaulted in turn.

The real Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, has a wretched, perverse history: the gang is thought to have been started in the 1980s in Los Angeles by Salvadoran immigrants whose families had fled the civil war in their country, a war partly paid for by the United States. The decentralized gang soon branched out, infiltrating most of the rest of the United States. And then, after members were deported to their native country, it spread beyond Central America, taking its brand of street terrorism transnational. You don't learn any of this in Sin Nombre, despite the film's veneer of (gritty yet lovingly lighted) realism. Fukunaga may have traveled through Mexico to research the film, but he hasn't strayed far from Hollywood to tell his tale.

To that end, Sin Nombre, despite its location shooting and unnerving glimpses into the Mara Salvatrucha, unwinds exactly like any number of movies juiced up by graphic violence and hinged to ritualistic redemption: terrible things happen, but the bad times and vibes are nominally assuaged by some final-act uplift. Thus Casper suffers horribly because of the Mara Salvatrucha, whose vile rituals get plenty of screen time.

However streetwise, Casper is as sentimentalized a fiction as one of those dirty-faced angels who ran around studio back lots in the 1930s, and his means of salvation, Sayra, isn't any better. The roads they travel and hardships they endure are finally narrative arcs, calibrated for maximum drama, excitement, and entertainment. What keeps the movie from tipping into full-blown exploitation like City of God, which turns third-world misery into art-house thrills, is Fukunaga's sincerity. What keeps you watching is his superb eye. Working with his cinematographer, Adriano Goldman, he fills in the cracks of his story with moments of beauty - children tossing oranges up to the train, Casper sleeping under a canopy of trees - that make you want to see what comes next.

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[lovingmusicallday]

i fucking love this movie i cried at the end...but i still love it:)

[CARMENAdderiy9765]

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[slipknot14k]

@luisgotyou nigguh tring 2 be all gangster huh??

[swesp483]

sin nombreeyyhhh

[bumblehead321]

Yeah the ending got me fucked up,you can find this movie in Netflix

[farsah14]

he would meet a girl that would change his life forever? WHAT? he gets blasted at the end. poor kid. stay away from gangs.

[santinasiford05]

dude, these are hilarious!! saw this in webmovietube

[payasolokoful]

u mothafuckers need to stop talking shit on youtube fagit ass pussies wont say shit about mexicans to one of our faces cause u know we dont fuck around