The Ciudad Juárez of Suzanne Andrews Correa’s La Cazadora/The Huntress is a city overwhelmed almost to paralysis by fear. The mundanity of violence plaguing the city is clear in the film’s opening montage of a desert morning, distant gunshots, suggesting multiple incidents, mixing seamlessly with the chorus of birds and barking dogs. Set in 2013, the film takes place during a period when hundreds of women and girls, many working at the US-owned maquiladoras at the edge of the city, were disappearing. If their bodies were found, they frequently showed signs of having been raped and tortured, and whoever was responsible remained at large. La Cazadora is named for a real, mysterious vigilante, a woman who, on successive mornings, shot two bus drivers in retaliation for their assaults on young female passengers. The woman subsequently wrote a letter to a local newspaper, claiming responsibility for the shootings, signing off as “Diana the Huntress of Bus Drivers.”
In Correa’s fictionalized take on these events, the vigilante is a woman named Luz (Adriana Paz), a maquiladora worker herself, and mother of a restless teen, Ale (Jennifer Trejo), who chafes desperately at Luz’s protectiveness. In tracking Luz’s movements and exploring her motives for and struggles with revenge, the film’s visuals deftly weave in a substantial amount of information detailing the conditions of the workers, and women of Juárez more generally, that contribute to their vulnerability, such as their dependence on public transportation to cover long distances at all hours of the day. Fortunately for both Luz and Ale, they’re attended by Luz’s seemingly devoted and well-intentioned boyfriend, Jaime, a taxi driver (an excellently nuanced Eme MalaFe). But one of La Cazadora‘s great strengths is its ability (often via subjective camerawork) to infect the viewer with Luz’s overwhelming distrust of appearances. The viewer quickly begins to share her sense that no interaction, such as a shopkeeper taking Ale’s photograph, can be simply what it seems.
In its visual style, then, La Cazadora is as much a horror film as it is a crime drama, which seems appropriate given the horrific scale and nature of the crimes that finally drive Luz to strike back, and the devastating helplessness of all the characters, those without power, all potential victims of any evil that comes along. Does Luz’s act make any of them safer? Will it change anything about the overwhelming misogyny of her society, or is it just another violent act in a city that already seems completely lawless?
Indeed, a good deal of the chill in La Cazadora comes from the dystopic realities of a society of complete impunity for those who occupy positions of social, legal, and economic power as well as for the criminal actors who resemble them, inevitably men, everyday men, that is, who are certain they can take what they want from any woman who crosses their path. I suppose there was a time when US audiences might have seen such a dystopia as exotic, something sad that happens somewhere else, in another world, across the border. But Ciudad Juárez is more than El Paso’s sister city. They’re twins, in the same city, in fact, their closest neighborhoods are separated by nothing more than a river. La Cazadora may be a historical fiction, but its representation of the paranoia and fear in a society where a powerful, secretive minority can exploit and implicitly and explicitly terrorize the communities over which they have control feels very real and present.
More significant than Luz’s murderous response to the patriarchal terror of her world is the emphasis La Cazadora puts on the power of community, of people learning to trust and support each other. To this end, two wide shots and a close-up toward the conclusion of the film best capture its culminating argument about sacrifice and strength. The wide shots, both of small crowds, contrast hopefully with an earlier image showing workers in the maquiladora, women all lined up at their benches, under the alien light of the factory floor, laboring away in collective isolation, eyes set on nothing more than the repetitive tasks they’re being underpaid for, on which the lives of their families and their city depend.
Perhaps it’s the hope embodied in those two later crowds, their audacious and speculative nature, that makes them feel a bit surreal. They’re affecting, as are several dream and traumatic memory sequences, shot and lit in a way that plunges the viewer directly into Luz’s wounded psyche. But overall, La Cazadora‘s most intensely emotional moments emerge from the quality performances of its principals—Paz, Trejo, MalaFe, and also Guillermo Alonso, as a persistent detective—within the predominant milieu of its often menacing realism.
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