El traspatio (Carlos Carrera, 2009): Mexico

Reviewed by Nicole Muhlethaler. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

If swine flu and the drug war violence haven’t stopped you from planning a vacation down south, this film will give you yet another reason to think twice before booking that Mexico trip.  El traspatio is a movie made with a mission: to educate its audience about the true horrors of the thousands of women who have been murdered in Juarez, Mexico in the past decade, and the fact that very little has been done about it. There is no doubt that you will walk away from this movie thoroughly disturbed, angry, possibly scared, and better informed about the horrific situation going on there.

A new police captain, Blanca Bravo, has been assigned to the city of Juarez, and what she finds there are thousands of unsolved deaths of young women – the majority being rape victims thrown out in the desert to rot in the sun. She must go on a hunt to find the killer – but could it possibly be just one murderer? Could there be just one problem to solve, or could it be multi-dimensional, including globalization, a culture raising machismo men, and unprotected, uneducated, and desperate women? As Captain Blanca hunts for her serial killer, finding a mostly unresponsive (and blatantly sexist) police department who prefers to cover up its horrific stories rather than share them and lose tourists, she comes up against a host of obstacles. Meanwhile, this story is juxtaposed with another chilling story: a young Mexican-Indian girl (pictured) arrives in Juarez from her rural village to stay with her cousin and work in a factory. Uneducated and naive about men, she begins dating around, only to find the dating world in Juarez is not at all what she was expecting or prepared for. Her lack of knowledge about her personal safety or the region leads to her eventual violent and horrific demise.

This movie, although tackling an important subject that needs to be highlighted, has its problems. The acting is not believable, and most of the dialogue feels contrived and forced. These characters haven’t been created to tell a believable story; they don’t speak to each other in a natural way at all. Who they are speaking to is the audience; to inform and educate. In some ways, I wonder if the movie would have been better off constructed as a documentary than a feature film.

The storyline with the young Indian girl moving to Juarez plays out exactly as one would expect it would, given the nature of the serious subject matter. However, the sexual violence is even more extreme and horrific than one would even imagine. If played as a short film for the hundreds of young women arriving in Juarez and the surrounding areas, it could be a very powerful film to educate those, especially coming from rural areas, about the dangers dwelling in and around Juarez. But as a feature film, the storyline is too contrived and obvious to really work for most viewers.

I also felt this way about the police captain Blanca’s storyline. It seems terribly obvious that one serial killer, or even a handful, are not responsible for the mass killings in this region in Mexico. Nothing new is gained from this storyline, other than the shocking stories of how extreme the sexual violence against women is in this region. The ending credits roll, displaying the numbers of sexually violent-related deaths in a number of countries; Mexico’s numbers shockingly increase each year. If a documentary movie had been made about the horrors of Juarez including numbers and facts like these, with real interviews and footage, I think the audience would have been more engaged than watching a poorly made, obvious, movie complete with bad acting, superficial characters, and bad dialogue.