Identifying Features
A mother's need to discover the fate of her missing son is at the heart of this deeply moving work.
Just recently when reviewing Nariman Aliev's Homeward, I acclaimed it as a first feature of rare maturity. That is not a quality that one expects from cinema debutants but quite extraordinarily it apples no less to Fernanda Valadez, the director and co-writer of Identifying Features. Hugely ambitious and, save for its final scenes, deeply assured, Identifying Features stands as testimony to the present suffering of so many Mexicans. Its focus is on those living in conditions that drive them to journey to the border intent on crossing into America despite the hazards and the film's central figure is Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández). She is a mother whose son, Jésus (Juan Jésus Varela), sets out with a friend, Rigo (Armando García), hoping to reach Arizona and find a better life there.
In a quick-moving introduction Valadez establishes this situation and also reveals that the two youths have then gone missing. Before long it is established that Rigo is dead - the bus on which the youths had been travelling had been waylaid - but there is no certainty as to the fate of Jésus. A burnt body is produced and Magdalena is asked to identify it, but she is sceptical. Believing that her son may in fact have survived, she sets out on her own travels hoping to uncover evidence of what happened to him. Her quest makes up the rest of the film although a further aspect is added to it. Another narrative thread is introduced, initially without any explanation - and it must be admitted that this is momentarily unsettling although it does come to fit in. This new material concerns a reverse journey: a young man named Miguel (David Illescas) who had made it to America is deported as an illegal and is now making his way back heading for Ocampo where he had lived with his mother. It is here that he eventually encounters Magdalena and their stories intertwine.
The aim behind the film is to portray this situation in human terms. Fernanda Valadez invites us to identify with Magdalena, a figure viewed with great intensity throughout, and she is undoubtedly the focal point here. But this is achieved without dramatising her story in such a way as to make it seem melodramatic. Nor does this become a highly personal individual tale. Instead, Magdalena emerges as a real but representative figure. The absence of more detailed background information about her only adds to the sense that this 48-year-old mother should be seen as somebody whose experiences match those of so many others. Her wanderings may be naturalistically presented but they conjure up a whole world, one as crushing as that captured in the writings of Kafka: bureaucracy is part of it, but the absolute power of those in control and the inability of the individual to break free or to find any resolution provide a devastating portrait of the poorer side of Mexican society today.
Valadez shows the human cost of all this and, aided by the deep sincerity of the lead performance by Mercedes Hernández, she reveals the full tragedy of the situation in a way that does not require her to add any investigation into blame as between the authorities on the one hand and the powerful drug cartels in the region on the other. The unforced power of the film lies in its humanity and in its appreciation of the special bond between a mother and her child. Later, when Miguel comes to play a fuller role in the story, the sympathy for those in his situation is no less apparent and, while Magdalena's quest to uncover the truth is continually frustrated by the authorities, the gestures of those who do seek to help her come over with a natural warmth. That's because once again they are shown without any attempt to work up our emotions. Significantly, the music score is only brought in occasionally and that is when Valadez wishes to underline the relentless power of the authorities and never is it used to manipulate our responses.
The certainty of touch displayed by Valadez led me to feel that Identifying Features would be a masterpiece and consequently one of the best films of the year. I did wonder for a long time why what had seemed to me to be a very naturalistic film had led at least one critic to refer to it as containing elements of magical realism. In fact, there is a scene late on in which an elderly witness describes horrors that he has seen and this sequence does show us the figure of the devil. This, however, can be regarded as his vision and the only doubt raised by this section of the film lies in it seeming inappropriately self-conscious to show this with the man's comments being heard over it and yet not translated in the subtitles. It is what comes afterwards that I find genuinely problematic. The film is powerful enough not to need anything extra by way of a big climax. Nevertheless, we are given one. Furthermore, it feels unconvincing if regarded in naturalistic terms because it is so contrived while the touches of mysticism added at this late stage muddy the waters unhelpfully by making us wonder if we are being asked to take it on a more symbolical level. Either way it feels like a false move and that is regrettable. Other viewers of course may react differently to this. But, even if you share my late disappointment, it cannot prevent Identifying Features from standing as an exceptional work, a near classic of a kind that very, very few debutant directors achieve.
Original title: Sin señas particulares.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Mercedes Hernández, David Illescas, Juan Jésus Varela, Ana Laura Rodriguez, Laura Elena Ibarra, Juan Pablo Acevedo, Xicoténcatl Ulloa, Manuel Campos, Jessica Martínez García, Armando García.
Dir Fernanda Valadez, Pro Jack Zagha Kababie, Asrtrid Rondero, Fernanda Valadez and Yossy Zagha, Screenplay Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez, Ph Chulia Becerril Bulos, Art Des Dalia Reyes, Ed Susan Korda, Music Clarice Jensen.
Avanti Pictures/Corpulenta Producciones/EnAguas Cine/Nephilim Producciones-BFI.
97 mins. Mexico/Spain. 2020. Rel: 1 May 2021. Available on BFI Player. No Cert.