The Barrio is Bleeding

Sangre de Mi Sangre Directed by Christopher Zalla

Originally titled Padre Nuestro when it premiered at Sundance in 2007 (and won the Audience Award), Sangre de Mi Sangre is decidedly not a fun, sexy summer movie, eschewing as it does romance for tentative connections forged in desperation, and fight scenes dripping with money for gritty life-or-death lunges on the streets of a Brooklyn rarely seen on film. Illegal immigrant Pedro’s (Jorge Adrián Espíndola) one foray into Park Slope ends when the little girl who answers the door of a brownstone assumes he’s a delivery boy. And this refusal to show the Disneyfied version of New York (which anyone with an interest in can gorge on with the release of the Sex and the City movie later this month) is eventually what makes Sangre so haunting.

Escaping from Mexico in the back of a truck, Pedro is headed to New York City in search of the father he’s never met, armed with a letter from his dead mother and a locket with pictures of both his parents. Juan (Aramando Hernández), meanwhile, jumps on board at the last minute to escape the men chasing. The two bond over Pedro’s hard-luck story and Juan’s knife. But Juan, who we naturally root for as he escapes his pursuers, turns out to be a not-so-nice person after he steals Pedro’s letter while he sleeps and shows up on his father’s doorstep, passing himself off as Pedro.

But if Juan is savvy enough to survive the mean streets (he effortlessly picks a pocket on his very first subway ride), Pedro is too naïve—or just too dumb—to get much of a head start. Unable to read or speak English, his solution is to speak as quickly as possible in Spanish to anyone he meets, usually while trying to touch them. This, as anyone who’s ever walked down the street, is not conducive to building trust. Neither are matters helped when Pedro falls in with the drugged-out hooker Magda (Paola Mendoza, trying to keep her character as tough as possible before becoming overwhelmed by Magda’s requisite heart of gold) who first manipulates him and eventually helps him search for his father. And in a painful coincidence that will eventually come home to roost, Juan has also made Magda’s acquaintance somehow, despite the fact that Brooklyn is rather large.

To write Sangre off as an unglamorous fairytale devalues what screenwriter/director Zalla achieves, though. Because while Juan is trying to convince Diego (Jesús Ochoa) that he’s Pedro to get his hands on the money he assumes is hidden somewhere in the sleazy apartment—and Pedro is looking for Diego with Magda—the two new boys in town slowly switch roles. It’s Juan who bonds with Diego and Diego’s co-workers over beers and dirty stories, and he angrily and tearfully confronts Diego with the way he treated Pedro’s mother. And while dragging a semi-conscious Magda back to her hovel, it’s Pedro who allows a man in an SUV to have sex with her for $50, after earlier trying to screw Magda for another john’s viewing pleasure and then beating him senseless for being a pervert.

Yet even as Pedro begins his descent from an innocent into a jaded pragmatist, Juan has already won Diego to his side with fantastical stories about the women he’s had sex with, eliciting a look from Diego that begins as horror and then gradually morphs into pride. Envisioning Pedro storming into their cozy new relationship is almost impossible at that point, and what’s more, somehow we don’t root for that particular happy ending. That no one here has any hope of a happy ending should be obvious from the beginning; everything from the ominous title (translated as Blood of My Blood) to that knife that was flashed early on spells ironic tragedy in the tradition of the Victorian novelists—who, come to think of it, were also fans of the occasional clumsy, clunky coincidence to move their plot along.