Sin Nombre

WE COULD, if we were feeling bitter, find space for a treatise on middle-brow film audiences' recent decision that South and Central America is just the right place to locate naive comedies ( Rudo y Cursi), classy soap operas ( Amores Perros) and, most frequently, a combination of gangster and western ( City of God). Illuminated by russet, gauzy suns and populated by people who, however poor, tend be pretty easy on the eye, the films are foreign enough to seem exotic, but not so foreign that they alienate suburban viewers.

When you hear that the latest addition to the genre was developed with help from the Sundance Institute and directed by a US citizen, you may reasonably conclude that the time has come for a backlash.

Restrain that unkind instinct.

For all its contrivance, Sin Nombreturns out to be a delicately acted, relentlessly gripping melodrama with a properly powerful conclusion (and a brilliant last shot). Synchronising its action to the relentless progress of a northbound train, Cary Joji Fukunaga's film may succumb to certain clichés of the holy urchin, but it rations its shocks so carefully and has such a sure sense of narrative balance that few sensible viewers will evade its grasp.

Sin Nombrebegins by keeping its two stories distinct. In Mexico, Casper (Edgar Flores), a young gang member, falls out with the savage, heavily tattooed hoodlums who decide what store to rob and which rival to assassinate. After deserting his post to flirt with a girlfriend, Casper receives a savage beating and learns that, during an attempted rape, the gang leader accidentally killed the unfortunate young woman.

Some miles south, Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), a decent-hearted Honduran girl, hops aboard a train’s roof with her father and uncle. They have ambitions to make their way to Texas and, from there, all the way to New Jersey. Events turn grim when Casper and his posse – who, please note, rob from the poor – turn up on the train and begin waving machetes around. At this point, Casper decides to do the right thing and something a little like a romance results.

The film is, to be sure, full of terrible events and terrible people. A young child, eager to be accepted into the gang, shoots a captive rival and watches as his entrails are fed to ravenous dogs. Hopeful migrants fall between the cars of the train and are ground into the rails.

Sin Nombreis, however, at heart a modestly sentimental piece of work. For all the ghastliness that afflicts the disenfranchised, the film-makers believes that certain of those people – the sort of people who become the heroes of such movies – are capable of compassion, clear-sightedness and selflessness. They are, of course, correct.

At any rate, allowing Sayra and Casper their decency permits the drama to play out in an agreeably mainstream arc. But don’t go expecting a documentary.