IDENTIFYING FEATURES: Lost In Focus

I heard a complaint recently about a lot of cinema and television today adhering to almost exclusively shallow-focus cinematography. In promotional video and TV advertising, where a lot of current cinema aesthetics are finding their influences, this is a common practice because both of those mediums are selling a central object or product that doesn’t need to be showcased in context to anything else. I’ve seen shallow focus be used to incredibly powerful lengths in movies like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) or the Dardenne Bros. Rosetta (1999). I’ve also seen it be visually distracting and boring like in Tyger Tyger (2021). It’s a refuge of the independent filmmaker as well because it paves over scenic limitations and a lot of affordable consumer lenses that maintain a professional feel (everyone is a sucker for bokeh) tend to be mostly short-focus lenses while. In Identifying Features, Fernanda Valadez uses shallow focus as an intrinsic part of her film’s thesis.

A Feeling Of Separation From Everything

The film centers on two individuals whose lives cross in their respective searches for a family member. The first is Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández) who searches for her missing son who left her to cross the U.S. Border. The second is Miguel (David Illescas) who has been recently deported from the U.S. and is making his way back into Mexico to find his mother. Neither knows whether their respective relative is alive or not and their search is one of confusion and displacement. Utilizing a myriad of tracking shots and establishing still shots, Valadez strikes a balance between portraiting her central characters and still providing some semblance of context to their relationship to the place they’re in. This becomes increasingly important as the film comes up to its third act.

Identifying Features takes its time to frustrating effect. Much of the movie’s first third is presented in a toned-down almost visually inert fashion, where walls, streets, and fields are blurry impressionistic splotches of gray, tan, and washed-out green. This gets at the sort of disconnect Magdalena feels from the rest of the world as her son has gone missing. A similar sort of visual distancing was used earlier this year in Kornél Mandruczó’s Pieces of a Woman when Vanessa Kirby’s character Martha lost her child. It’s an effective technique and Mercedes Hernandez does her best to carry these isolationist sequences, but an over-reliance on these shots renders much of the movie’s buildup difficult to get through.

Hidden in the Frame

The thesis comes into focus in the second half, however, and the power of what Valadez is attempting becomes clear once Magdalena finds out from an older gentleman where her son may have been. The film takes strange and terrifying narrative turns that, similar to Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies (2010), build a tragic history of a region through the way violence cuts through blood bonds.

This is where the cinematography takes on the most important role in the movie. As an old man relays what he thinks may have happened everything is out of focus.

Conclusion

The shallow focus, in these recollections, simulates the human eye and mind, subjective in creating narrative and imagined truth that changes and shifts as it continues through the film. As a filmmaking technique, the results of Valadez’s camerawork are wide-ranging, but in the end, showcase an effective way that particular shots are able to create effect far beyond just visual allure. In addition to the words in a script or the dialogue spoken in a film, the composition of shots and what the filmmaker chooses to reveal or not are often the greatest indicators of narrative mastery. Identifying Features takes time to get going but successfully wagers the audience’s patience with a terrifying finale that lingers long after the credits.

Identifying Features is playing at selected theaters and virtual cinemas in the U.S.

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