The central character in 'Identifying Features' is Magdalena, a poor woman from central México whose teenage son decides to emigrate to the United States with a friend. But the friend subsequently turns up brutally murdered, and Magdalena travels to the border region in an attempt to find out what has happened to her now-missing boy. In essence this is a road movie, as while travelling through the crowded towns and sparsely-populated countryside Magdalena meets various people - a doctor looking for her own missing son, a deportee whose mother has gone missing from a bandit-infested region in his absence, even a courageous worker at a bus garage.
Lead actress Mercedes Hernández at first lost me: her immobile face made her difficult to accept as an anguished parent. But as the film progressed I warmed to her, as she allowed rare moments of emotion to shine through. However, considering the distances her character was supposed to have walked, she appeared unfeasibly energetic in most scenes, as she hurried along in a manner suggesting she was just nipping down to the corner shop for some teabags rather than walking several miles over potholed pavements and rocky fields.
Magdalena's Olympic-level energy was not the only example of the film's staging not matching up to the story: in one scene an elderly man who has supposedly just been so badly beaten it will take him weeks to recover, is shown with no discernable injuries, standing perfectly straight-backed and upright. In fact, I found 'Identifying Features' a tough watch, and not only because the British Film Institute's iPlayer service on which I was watching kept freezing every few minutes: director Fernanda Valadez employed a number of arty flourishes which I found annoying: the multiple shots of clouds, blades of grass, stars etc which in some films add a sense of mood and pacing but in this had "padding" written all over them; the shots of people doing nothing of any consequence (eg staring into space) for minutes at a time; conversations in which only one participant was visible to the viewer; and a pivotal scene delivered not in the Spanish in which most of the production is shot, but in a regional language featured in all its untranslated glory.
So as interesting as the story was, this was, sadly, a much-flawed production.
Lead actress Mercedes Hernández at first lost me: her immobile face made her difficult to accept as an anguished parent. But as the film progressed I warmed to her, as she allowed rare moments of emotion to shine through. However, considering the distances her character was supposed to have walked, she appeared unfeasibly energetic in most scenes, as she hurried along in a manner suggesting she was just nipping down to the corner shop for some teabags rather than walking several miles over potholed pavements and rocky fields.
Magdalena's Olympic-level energy was not the only example of the film's staging not matching up to the story: in one scene an elderly man who has supposedly just been so badly beaten it will take him weeks to recover, is shown with no discernable injuries, standing perfectly straight-backed and upright. In fact, I found 'Identifying Features' a tough watch, and not only because the British Film Institute's iPlayer service on which I was watching kept freezing every few minutes: director Fernanda Valadez employed a number of arty flourishes which I found annoying: the multiple shots of clouds, blades of grass, stars etc which in some films add a sense of mood and pacing but in this had "padding" written all over them; the shots of people doing nothing of any consequence (eg staring into space) for minutes at a time; conversations in which only one participant was visible to the viewer; and a pivotal scene delivered not in the Spanish in which most of the production is shot, but in a regional language featured in all its untranslated glory.
So as interesting as the story was, this was, sadly, a much-flawed production.