The trouble for filmmakers tackling topics that many before them have previously addressed isn’t in how to tell their story well, at least no more than it is for any filmmaker. It’s how to convince people that their story is worth watching even if you’ve seen and heard all those previous tales. An original angle can suffice, provided it’s both integral to the story and exhibited throughout the movie. A particularly high standard of filmmaking can work too, provided it’s consistent. It is, thus, regrettable that Teodora Mihai’s La Civil, a Mexican movie about drug cartels, possesses neither an original angle nor a particularly high standard of filmmaking. And yet, with sincerity, sensitivity and a solid grasp on how to navigate her movie’s tonal and narrative modulations, Mihai gets away with it nonetheless.
Running considerably over the two-hour mark, there’s unusually little story to sustain La Civil; it instead maintains momentum via a handful of unexpected shifts in focus. The establishing scene notwithstanding, the first act is a taut, emotionally charged picture of a mother’s desperation upon learning of her teenage daughter’s kidnapping, her scrambled attempts at buying her safe return and, eventually, her increasingly all-consuming resolve to seek her out after those attempts fail. In these demanding early scenes, Arcelia Ramírez is adequately convincing as Cielo, the missing girl’s mother, though her rather reserved approach seems less to expose the subtleties in her performance than it does, perhaps, cover for their lack. She’s maybe just unlucky, in that Mihai has also cast Mercedes Hernández (albeit in a brief part), whose leading turn in the similarly-plotted Identifying Features two years ago is one of the most extraordinary screen performances of recent times.
Act two finds Cielo going to extremes in her search. Having defied the kidnappers’ orders by contacting the Guardia Nacionál, she herself comes under their attack, which prompts the Guardia to make her an offer: join them on their hunt in the hope that she’ll find her daughter, provided she obeys their orders, stays out of their way and respects that their mission is not the same as hers. Theirs is to root out criminals and, in lieu of the expectation of justice, largely kill them on the scene. And so La Civil becomes an action movie of sorts, DP Marius Panduru’s camera following Cielo around rural drug dens and brothels in long takes as the majority of the violence occurs off screen. If these scenes are arguably the movie’s least essential, they’re also among its most compelling — there’s a vérité edge to them, as though we’re watching a war documentary and they somewhat deliver a necessary jolt of energy to a movie that was beginning to flag.
Act three, however, settles down once more, as Cielo and her ex-husband, Gustavo (Álvaro Guerrero, Ramírez’s inverse here, overacting slightly), work off information she gleaned during her clandestine nocturnal raids. On purely narrative terms, La Civil wraps up fairly satisfactorily, even if Mihai and co-writer Habacuc Antonio de Rosario don’t even appear to register the suggestions their screenplay has seemingly sprinkled through the preceding two hours. What comes off as accidental disregard is excusable in the end, since La Civil ends pretty well on its own terms… until it doesn’t. Mihai’s choice of closing shot is utterly frustrating, a crass stab at manufacturing an enigmatic tease out of material that neither needed it nor authentically engendered it. It’s cheap, pointless and, thankfully, not especially effective.
But, then, what is the point of La Civil at all? Despite her background as a Romanian, Mihai doesn’t provide much originality to an already-familiar story and, despite her evident skill and talent, she can’t quite cultivate that exceptionally high standard of filmmaking that it might need to truly succeed. The movie is handsomely mounted and boasts a number of strong performances (alongside a few more of varying quality). But it’s still yet another movie about drug cartels, alas, one with a number of predecessors that do almost exactly what it does. Some just did it first but some did it better and, ultimately, it’s this inevitable comparison that holds La Civil back.
Photo courtesy of Zeitgeist Films
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