‘Identifying Features’ powerful, poignant visionary work

“Identifying Features”

Not Rated. In Spanish with subtitles. At the Brattle Theater.

Grade: A minus

An almost David Lynchian exercise in anxiety, fear and dread, “Identifying Features,” a modest and yet visually striking film about a mother searching for her lost son, launches director-co-writer Fernanda Valadez, making her feature film debut, into the forefront of a new breed of film stylists. These include Chloe Zhao (“Nomadland”), Ana Lily Amirpour (“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”) and the directing team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (“The Endless”). These visionaries paint with light, landscape and architecture. They create mood and atmosphere with discordant sound and lighting effects and music. They are artists of unease.

With relatively few words, Valadez tells the story of Magdalena (Mercedes Hernandez), a mother from Guanajuato who has bid farewell to her son Jesus (Juan Jesus Valera). The biblical echo in their names resounds. He’s headed to “la frontera.” When she doesn’t hear from him, Magdalena makes inquiries and is told by the authorities that her son may be dead. In a photo, the mother of Jesus’s companion recognizes her son’s burned body. Magdalena sees no trace of Jesus. She travels to the border by bus. She will travel further on foot, in a boat and in a truck. The landscape is wild and in some areas tamed by roads and lights. A young man traveling near the border stops on a footbridge above a sea of hellish red taillights. In one scene, two occupants of truck are bathed in pink and blue lights. Are they shades of regret? Director Valadez, who shoots in widescreen, has a painter’s eye, and she makes a reference to one of cinema’s most disturbing images when she shows us actual eye surgery in one scene.

A bus company employee secretly reveals to Magdalena that buses go missing, passengers are hijacked and kidnapped. One is reminded of “Missing,” Costa-Gavras’ realistic kidnapping tale in which an American father searches for his journalist son in 1970s Chile. We hear about shallow graves, and see a montage of lost articles of clothing. Magdalena meets Miguel (David Illescas) on the road. He is trying to return to his mother in country where armed men terrorize the impoverished inhabitants. Is that really the devil beside a bonfire in a scene of rape and slaughter? “Identifying Features” is replete with mirror images, distraught mothers, a devil and a diabolical, flame-lit scene of murder and rape. Shot with a largely female crew, “Identifying Features” grew out of a 2014 short film by Valadez also with Hernandez as the mother and is meant to make us think about U.S. policies regarding immigrants from the Mexican border. In her debut as a film composer, Clarice Jensen conducts a symphony of torment and despair. “Identifying Features” is the immigrant “I Saw the Devil.”

(“Identifying Features” contains gun violence and rape)

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2XZYbYr