[ad_1]
Hatzín is an adolescent kid from Mexico City, first met arriving in northern Mexico near the US border. Played by Hatzín Navarrete – at the time of casting a non-professional actor – he’s there to collect the remains of his father, a man he barely knew, who was seemingly killed in an industrial accident. Offered a box and an identification card with a barely discernible photo of the dead man, Hatzín sets off on the long journey back, but changes his mind and jumps off the bus when he sees a man who looks like the picture on the ID card. Hatzín is convinced with possibly irrational fervour – the film never makes it quite clear if he’s deluded or not – that this is actually his father, who is now only pretending to be someone named Mario. Mario keeps trying to brush the kid off, gently at first and then with more force when he just keeps coming back.
Like Jacob in the Old Testament who insisted on wrestling with an angel until he blessed him, Hatzín wins the struggle eventually but pays a price for it. Mario (Hernán Mendoza) takes the boy in under his wing and puts him to work in his sleazy business recruiting people to work under brutal conditions in the local garment factories. There’s a very telling moment that says a lot about postcolonial capitalism when Mario rallies potential recruits by saying that their real enemy is the Chinese; they, he argues, will put their own children to work, taking advantage of their tiny hands, leaving Mexicans and Latin Americans like themselves in poverty unless they compete.
Director Lorenzo Vigas, who collaborated on the script with Paula Markovitch and Laura Santullo, adeptly manoeuvres things so that the film slides effortlessly from mystery to criminal story to quasi-Greek tragedy, changing registers with subtle alterations of tone. The landscape – vast, desiccated, menacing – is practically a character in its own right, full of inscrutable secrets like Hatzín’s own deadpan face. The kid barely cracks a smile but he has an incredible presence, and genuine chemistry with the more experienced Mendoza; the latter projects a charisma that’s understandably compelling to the boy. Be warned though: this is the kind of film where there are drawn-out shots in which nothing happens other than a speck of vehicle or person in the distance trudging from one corner of the screen to the next, which might try the patience of more fidgety viewers.
[ad_2]
Source link
