El Sicario Room 164

by Richard Porton

The following review of El Sicario Room 164 is excerpted from the feature article, “Documentary Cinema and Reality Hunger,” by Richard Porton, which appeared in Cineaste, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, Summer 2011, and is reprinted here in light of the New York theatrical premiere of the film for a one-week engagement, December 28th through January 3rd, at Film Forum in New York.

Unlike The Arbor and The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, which seek to illuminate the lives of what, for lack of a better word, could be termed “celebrities,” Gianfranco Rosi’s remarkable El Sicario Room 164 is a concerted effort to reveal the significance of a nonentity, a hooded, anonymous ex-sicario or hit man (with a $250,000 contract on his head) for the Mexican drug cartels interviewed in an eerily drab motel room near the border. One peculiarity of Rosi’s film is that, being based on a Harper’s article—“The Sicario: A Juárez Hit Man Speaks—by Charles Bowden that covers much of the same ground as the film, it is a nonfiction adaptation and almost comes across, despite Rosi’s access to the same sicario who spilled the beans to Bowden, as a skillful simulation. Early reviews of the film have not been timid in noting that Rosi challenges the audience to accept the authenticity of a man—captured unflinchingly in static long takes—admitting to the most horrific acts of murder and torture. Bowden is an enormously skillful storyteller (as well as a spellbinding conversationalist on radio and television) and the anecdotes in Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields are recounted with the hard-boiled verve of a twenty-first-century Raymond Chandler—as well as the radical passion of a man convinced that the carnage in Mexico is a direct result of both NAFTA and the U.S. and Mexican government’s ill-advised “war on drugs.” It’s also clear that Bowden is concerned with literary craftsmanship; the account of his encounter with the sicario in Murder City, while identical in substance, is slightly, if noticeably, different in its structure and wording.

Although a Frontline or 60 Minutes segment on Rosi’s protagonist would doubtless contextualize the sicario’s testimony with ponderous voice-over or found footage, his unadorned mixture of boastfulness, self-flagellation, and willingness to underline Mexican and U.S. bureaucrats’ complicity with the bloodthirsty agenda of the “narcos” (i.e., drug traffickers) possesses a raw power that needs no embellishment. The closest the film comes to visual ornamentation are the rudimentary drawings that the sicario jots down with his Sharpie to illustrate his trajectory from university dropout to hired killer and finally, if incongruously, repentant evangelical Christian. Despite his remorse, the ex-killer, responsible for hundreds of murders, remains somewhat proud of his talents. He speaks of the sicario’s need to dress and behave proper according to a circumscribed code, to kill “quickly and cleanly” so the “victim feels nothing.” His reenactment of a torture session in the motel’s bathroom is much more reminiscent of a banal domestic spat than a gruesome horror film. The sicario nonchalantly admits that “you have to stay high and drunk all of the time to overcome your scruples.”

Much more shockingly, his account of the power structure in Mexico, and the obliviousness of U.S. officials, makes it clear that the supposed soldiers in the war on drugs are ultimately indistinguishable from the drug lords they’ve been hired to obliterate. Admitted as a cadet to the police academy, and subsequently trained by the FBI, he has little doubt that “the narcos pay off everyone: police, immigration officials, governments.” He proclaims that approximately fifty members of the police academy’s graduating class are siphoned off by the drug magnates and proves absolutely convincing in his assertion that “the army and police are training ground for future narcos—they’ve already learned how to use a gun, to pursue someone and keep them under surveillance.” All authority, in fact, has been essentially transferred to the underground drug economy and its minions. It’s not “certain that the president is involved in trafficking, but all under his control have been bought off by the traffickers.”

Whereas films such as Self Made, The Arbor, and The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye explore the politics of the self, El Sicario Room 164 probes the psyche of a man whose sense of self has been shaped and reified by the State. Psychological analysis is futile when assessing such an individual. In Bowden’s Harper’s article, the sicario insists that “we are not monsters….you shut off parts of your mind and follow orders,” the groupthink that predominates in all authoritarian societies and subcultures. Instead of a psychological profile of a killer, Rosi instead offers us the paradox of a truth-teller whose insights into the savage capitalism of the cartels is conveyed entirely through performance. Given the emotional roller-coaster ride that the sicario takes the audience on—from gruesome reenactments of torture to a weepy conversion experience—it’s not surprising that the film appears to flirt with a number of different genres. Max Goldberg remarks that “El Sicario Room 164 cunningly exploits the gap between two of the primary antecedents of the documentary interview: the legal disposition and the spiritual confession. (http://mubi.com/notebook/posts?author_id=132)

At times, the sicario’s musings also bring to mind theatrical monologs or literary diatribes, even though he always comes off as thoroughly earnest, whether miming a brutal assault or discussing his newfound love of God. His tale is so compelling that most will tend to find him a reliable narrator, despite our full knowledge that cinema has an infinite capacity for duplicity and manipulation.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXVII No.1 2011

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