Identifying Features
Fernanda Valadez’s “Identifying Features” starts out with one woman on a seemingly hopeless mission, and ends with that woman having accepted the truth, and made decisions accordingly. It starts with a mother’s denial, and ends with her quiet horror. The film is a journey to a place that doesn’t exist anymore, where families are reunited, and home is a welcome destination. It’s a haunting film, and one that takes a piece of you when it ends because of where it leaves the main character.
Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) and Olivia (Ana Laura Rodríguez) sent their boys on the journey across the border to America for a better life. That was several weeks ago, and they haven’t heard from them. There has been talks of attacks of buses up across the border, or up to the border, and they worry about whether that happened to their sons. They go up, and give blood. Olivia identifies her son, but even with a bag of his found, and partial blood matches, Magdalena cannot believe that her son is dead. So she goes closer to the border, to the bus depot, just trying to find out what might have happened to her son.
If the film had just been about Magdalena’s journey, it still would have been affecting, but we also come to know Miguel (David Illescas), who’s been deported back to Mexico, and is trying to get home. He meets up with Magdalena trying to get back to his village, and she follows him, but his village is not what it once was, and has been left to ruin. He tries to go to a family member’s house, but there’s nothing for him there. In Miguel, Magdalena sees a lot of her own son; Miguel dismisses it by saying, “From behind, we all look alike.” I wonder how their stories would have ended if they had just gone back to Magdalena’s home together.
The screenplay by Valadez and Astrid Rondero is simplicity itself in the story its telling, but it’s in the choices Valadez makes as a first-time director that makes “Identifying Features” hit so hard by the end. There’s some beautiful imagery in this, but the way she stages some scenes, like when Magdalena is trying to get answers, or talking with authorities, is why we feel so much a part of the experience with her. That includes the finale, where she finally understands the truth. In the way, it’s more painful than anything she could have thought before, because there’s no way for true reconciliation with what the reality is now. The way she finds closure is heartbreaking, leaving a resonate power for the movie as it ends.
