LA CIVIL: One Mother’s Tireless Quest For Justice

Winner of the Un Certain Regard Prize of Courage at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, La Civil chronicles one desperate mother’s quest to recover her kidnapped daughter in Northern Mexico. Directed by Belgian-Romanian filmmaker Teodora Ana Mihai (Waiting for August) from a script co-written by Mihai with Mexican writer Habacuc Antonio De Rosario, the film boasts a laundry list of festival favorites as co-producers — Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Cristian Mungiu, and Michel Franco — and a devastating performance by veteran actress Arcelia Ramírez in the leading role. Yet what starts as a bleak, almost documentary-style exploration of how crime and corruption impact everyday life in Northern Mexico gradually becomes a more stereotypical — and somewhat disappointing — revenge thriller over the course of its hefty 135-minute running time.

Hell Hath No Fury

Cielo (Ramírez) assumes her teenage daughter Laura (Denisse Azpilcueta) is safely hanging out with a friend until she gets the phone call that every mother dreads: Laura has been kidnapped and will not be safely returned unless Cielo delivers a ransom of 200,000 pesos and her estranged husband’s pickup truck. Cielo and her husband, Gustavo (Álvaro Guerrero), work together to collect the ransom and deliver it to the gangsters — a surprisingly baby-faced bunch led by a charismatic young man called El Puma (Daniel García). Yet Laura never reappears.

After attempts to get the indifferent local authorities involved come to naught, Cielo decides to investigate El Puma and the company herself. Threatening phone calls and dangerous acts of vandalism ensue, but Cielo is undeterred. Eventually, she allies herself with an army lieutenant named Lamarque (Jorge A. Jiménez) who has recently been stationed in the region, combining her considerable local knowledge with the military’s firepower to try and take down the criminal enterprise that has deprived Cielo of her daughter. But as Cielo gradually learns, vengeance does not always come with resolution.

Truth Masked As Fiction

The story of La Civil is inspired by the life of Miriam Rodríguez Martínez, a Mexican mother and activist whose daughter Karen was kidnapped and murdered by the cartels. Armed with a handgun and a variety of disguises, Rodríguez tracked her daughter’s killers across the country for years, almost single-handedly capturing 10 of the criminals involved. She also started a group to support other parents whose children had disappeared. In 2017, on the day Mexico celebrates Mother’s Day, gunmen broke into her home and killed her.

Before Rodríguez was murdered, she met Mihai and shared her story; Mihai set out to make a documentary about Rodríguez, but when the dangers proved too much, decided to loosely adapt her life into fiction instead. The resulting narrative film bears the influence of Mihai’s background in documentary filmmaking, especially in the beginning when the camera — handheld and always close to lead actress Ramírez, who is in almost every frame—follows Cielo and Gustavo as they try to scrounge up the money for Laura’s ransom, emptying bank accounts and taking out loans from local businessmen. There’s something strangely mundane about the way their strife is depicted onscreen, as though disappearances like Laura’s are part of the fabric of daily life.

The most powerful scenes in La Civil are those that deal with the procedural side of Cielo’s quest: a nightmarish trip to an overcrowded morgue, brutalized corpses lined up on the floors, to see if one of two recently discovered decapitated bodies belongs to Laura; a fruitless trip to the police station in which Cielo is made to feel that Laura’s disappearance is somehow her daughter’s fault; the moment when Cielo and Gustavo receive the DNA results from the contents of the mass graves that the two of them discovered just by going out to El Puma’s ranch and digging themselves. These moments of gritty realism, in which La Civil depicts all of the different ways in which bureaucracy obstructs real human justice, have just as big an impact on the viewer as the explosions of violence that populate the latter half of the film… if not much more so.

In fact, it’s at the point in the film when Lamarque and the military get involved that La Civil starts to lose its way, becoming a series of scenes of Lamarque brutalizing suspects (and encouraging Cielo to do the same) and his troops erupting in gunfire. Setting aside the somewhat icky notion of the military as helpful heroes, literally beating the cartels into submission on Cielo’s behalf, these sequences are also just not very interesting; they feel as though they could have been copied and pasted from a million other films about conquering corruption by any means necessary. The dialogue in the latter part of the film is also particularly weak and rife with tough-guy cliche. And when you have real-life anecdotes about Rodríguez literally chasing down criminals in the street and jabbing her pistol into their backs, who needs plotlines involving the military anyway?

Despite these issues, Ramírez’s performance remains incredibly powerful and affecting throughout the film; her depiction of Cielo’s evolution from middle-aged housewife to avenging angel feels authentic even when the plot strikes notes that feel strangely false. One of the film’s final scenes, in which she sits down across from a suspect and engages in increasingly frustrating back and forth with him about his role in her daughter’s disappearance, is far more engaging — and terrifying — than all of the gunfire in the world.

Conclusion

La Civil is ultimately an uneven crime thriller carried by an exceptional actress. Still, its subject matter is so important, and certain moments so impactful, that one is almost inclined to overlook its weaknesses. Almost.

La Civil opens at Film Forum in New York on March 3, 3023 before expanding across the United States. You can find additional screening dates here.

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