In his latest film, New Order, Mexican director Michel Franco (Chronic, After Lucia) displays all the style, sensibility, and efficiency of a meat grinder. The opening act is promising enough, observing as some of Mexico City’s wealthiest and most well-connected, gathered together for a posh wedding reception, begin to feel the faint reverberations of political unrest unfolding outside their immediate purview. But about 20 minutes in, once armed protestors interrupt the festivities, the film becomes populated not so much by characters as bodies to be brutalized, and things quickly spiral into violent chaos. A montage surveying the destruction lingers on a visibly pregnant woman with a bullet in her stomach, and it’s typical of Franco’s approach that while we don’t see the act, he makes damn sure we picture it on our heads and get a good, long look at the aftermath. If nothing else, New Order demonstrates that the line that separates festival-lauded arthouse films from crass exploitation fare can be very thin indeed.
Marianne (Naian González Norvind), the 25-year-old bride-to-be and the closest thing the film has to a protagonist, actually manages to avoid this initial carnage. Before the violence began, she’d left her own wedding to go after Rolando (Eligio Meléndez), a former employee who’d come to the family for help with an urgent medical bill; her mother and brother had turned him away. But as Franco’s script operates under the principle that no good deed goes unpunished, suffering still awaits Marianne. The day after that initial uprising, some soldiers pick her up on the pretext of taking her home, only to bring her to a holding facility where she and other one percenters are held for ransom, systematically tortured, and raped. In one scene, we see masked soldiers about to sodomize a man with a cattle prod.
There does seem to be a purpose to all this. Following Marianne’s capture, we skip forward a month to a point of uneasy political equilibrium, only to find things unchanged in some crucial ways. Marianne’s surviving family and fiancé still live in their old homes and seem no more financially hard up than before, while Rolando and his family, for their part, are if anything worse off. Franco intentionally keeps the macro details of governance rather vague, but whoever is in control, things basically look and function like a totalitarian, military-backed state. So at least one thing is clear: The new order has simply consolidated the old one.
Insofar as New Order has a point, then, it’s that any popular uprising risks being co-opted by corrupt, fascist forces. Hence, perhaps, why the working-class rebels—predominantly dark-skinned, while the wealthy family is light-skinned—are here treated like an undifferentiated, undirected mass of revolutionary energy. This sort of cynicism is arguably conservative, even pernicious. But however one construes Franco’s politics, the much larger problem is that he tries to sidestep the pesky how of it all. Building a dystopia requires actual imagination, and New Order evinces little of that. For all of its apocalyptic foreboding, the film is curiously vague on the details of how anything really functions in this New Order, and there’s precious little sense of what it’s like to actually live under it from day to day. There are lines for water and food, mostly, it seems, because those are the kinds of things that one finds in a dystopia. By the end, the ill-defined situation feels like little more than a pretext for cramming as much savagery as possible into 88 minutes.
Franco seems to have taken Jean-Luc Godard’s oft-quoted (and oft-abused) dictum, “It’s not blood, it’s red,” as license to slather his canvas with all manner of lurid detail. But to borrow from the French director’s more recent The Image Book, there is such a thing as the violence of the act of representation—and Franco, for his part, seems only too unbothered by this. Filmmakers like Michael Haneke, Gaspar Noé, and Lars von Trier are often condemned for being pointlessly provocative, for practically daring viewers to turn away with scenes that threaten to break their films (and sometimes do). A movie like New Order elicits an arguably tougher charge: For all of its horrific violence, it does its damnedest to keep you watching. Its logic is a kind of calculated, ritualized sadism, making sure we know just how bad things are, while also cutting away before the worst of it.
To be clear: New Order wouldn’t necessarily be a better movie if Franco had chosen to linger on the most appalling moments of violence. But what his shock-and-awe tactics demonstrate is a marked unwillingness to think through the ramifications of what he’s presenting. We routinely and rightly scrutinize depictions of war and the Holocaust for how they handle and represent atrocities—for while fidelity to the historical record isn’t the rule, artists do have some sort of ethical responsibility in how they choose to portray past horrors. It doesn’t follow, though, that all methods are therefore permissible under the cover of speculative fiction. And there seems little reason why New Order, despite being set in the near-future as opposed to the historical past, shouldn’t be held to a similar level of scrutiny as, say, Schindler’s List. (Certainly, some of the imagery Franco deploys—such as of Marianne and her fellow prisoners naked and huddled together amid a tiled shower room—is no less charged.)
What New Order offers, ultimately, is a kind of stupid realism: Everything could happen and is therefore “true” (read: important), but it’s also just speculative, so don’t fixate on the details. The brutality of New Order’s dystopian Mexican state may be hypothetical, but Franco’s sordid manipulations are all too real.
42 Comments
Ah, the gentleman’s F. Somehow even more insulting than the real thing!
A.A. Dowd graded this film a B. I consider this film my favorite of last year, for many reasons.
I disagree with most of this moralizing review’s insights and conservative opinion on how violence should be portrayed on film. I would recommend a watch only if you enjoy harsh and intelectual films like those from the other provocative directors this review names (and add Pasolini and Buñuel to that list) and to make up your own mind.
A.A. Dowd is a contrarian weirdo, so there you go..
Dowd is a fantastic reviewer and the best thing that remains of this site.
Dowd is pretty reliable, and aside from whenever I.V. or Jesse pop up for a review, it’s always a good time. Even if the movie is shite, the review is not. And I think the core belief is that if it’s a bad film, I.V. should be the one reviewing it. His takedowns are Sean O’Neal level, easily.
All of those are great, and let’s not forget Tom Breihan and Caroline Seide’s retrospective articles.
Both of their current and past column series are always great. I’m always pissed when I take a few days off from the AVC and end up missing one of their new articles. I’m furloughed yet again because COVID, and yet again I’m having a hard time keeping track of time, let alone days.
Agreed!
I like Dowd a lot, but Ignatiy Vishnevetsky is my favorite. Especially when he eviscerates a D/F movie. Funny, without seeming like he’s practicing a stand-up routine or shoehorning in jokes, and he is great at noting all the ways in which a film fails without seeming petty or overly mean.
Even a brief Google search for reviews of the movie yields a fairly even number of positive and negative reviews. That is not contrarian.
I feel serious side-eye encroaching on my face whenever someone leans on “intellectual” in a recommendation of a “harsh” film.
I feel serious side-eye encroaching on my face whenever someone leans on “intellectual” in a recommendation of a “harsh” film. Yeah, like…Salo may be “intellectual” (having been made in that era of artistically elevated, barely post-pubescent sexual exploitation flicks that totally weren’t ever steeped in pederast weirdness, nossir), but it’s also a whole bunch of exploitative shit, presenting barely-surface-level “lessons” I could learn better by reading the original work.
Especially when they misspell “intellectual…”
I considered throwing shade on that but I wanted to have more substantive snark. But you ain’t lyin.
How would you respond to this reviewer’s critique of the film’s political point of view, i.e.: “This sort of cynicism is arguably conservative, even pernicious.”
As I said, I disagree with most of his insights, like that one for example. Since when any depiction of a rising force as “undifferentiated, undirected mass of” rebels makes it a “conservative” cynic view? And why? The focus was to expand on the characters of the rich family and the low-class servants. Why do you must detail every faction in a movie? The director chose to focus on certain characters for a reason, and the message (which is always debatable, but to me at least) is anything but conservative and very much anti-military.
Couldn’t you at least bump the score up to a C out of respect for Ian Curtis’ 41st death day?
How can a man die 41 times?
By having more grit than the young people do these days.
And the 41st time, he woke up dead! How the hell do you wake up dead?!
ask Dave Mustaine
ask Dave Mustaine
Ask Dave Mustaine
Gumption!
This seems like a polarizing one. For my part, I think that Franco was on the right track—when it comes to revolutions, there will always be people who revel in bloodshed, and you need only look at the average guillotine-obsessed edgelord with 100K followers to see how that kind of thinking is allowed to flourish. That said, surely there are more artful (and frankly, more interesting) ways to get that theme across. If you’re not Haneke (and sometimes even if you are) it just feels like mashing your nose in a dog turd.
I hate Haneke’s theme pushing. He’s an excellent filmmaker but a terrible pulpit thumper.
Please tell me it’s at least scored to “Power, Corruption & Lies?”
The reviewer doesn’t like the murder and confusion among the wedding procession. It leads to shell shock and a blue Monday. But, that’s the state of the nation.
Brawndo must’ve paid some big bucks to have their third mutilating beverage featured so heavily in this.
That last paragraph is pure horseshit. Hold a FICTIONAL piece of work to the same scrutiny as Schindler’s List? Absolutely bananas. Hell, we don’t even hold pieces based on real events to any sort of standard. (See again, Schindler’s List. Or, a better example, something like Argo.)This whole review reads like “I didn’t like it because it was violent” and that’s not an acceptable basis for a review, IMO. I have absolutely watched things in the past that I felt were too violent but at least I could articulate WHY they felt that way. (It was unimaginative, added nothing to the story, was executed poorly, didn’t make thematic sense, didn’t fit the rest of the movie’s tone, was exploitative towards certain social groups, etc etc.)Do better. And also, add a profile pic. It looks like they just hired some rando from the comments to write this otherwise.
Did we read the same review? It articulated why the movie failed in the eyes of the reviewer quite clearly, and quite clearly it was not because it was violent. I interpreted it as the reviewer feeling that it was working hard at being speculative – ie, plausible near nonfiction (‘it’s practically happening today!”) – while excusing itself from the responsibility of not being exploitive in its violent imagery. I don’t have to agree to understand the argument being made of a movie that want it both ways, particularly if it obstinately avoids being specific in its world. At any rate, that’s what I read. I’m not here to argue the point, I just disagree with your reductive reading. Hell, we don’t even hold pieces based on real events to any sort of standard. I mean, it’s a very broad goal that is pretty subjective, but I think it’s silly to suggest there isn’t a general critical aversion/distain for exploitation when dealing with historical subject matter of a horrific nature. Obviously finding movies that were given different degrees of passes isn’t difficult homework, but it doesn’t invalidate the point in my opinion.It looks like they just hired some rando from the comments to write this otherwise.That’s petty, sheesh.
I have absolutely watched things in the past that I felt were too violent but at least I could articulate WHY they felt that way. That all came across just fine to me. ::shrug::
Did you only read that one paragraph?
I think the review actually did a pretty job of explaining why the reviewer felt that the violence in the film didn’t add anything to the story other than pure shock value and/or to aggressively underline what seems to be the very banal themes of the film. Any freshman history major can tell you that political revolutions are often co-opted by malign actors and can result in horrific human suffering most acutely felt by those at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder.
After reading the headline and the first couple of sentences, I scrolled down to the credits box to see if it would be on Netflix. Nope. Would they even air something like this? Maybe not? I don’t know.So this film is 2021’s The Painted Bird. *checks JustWatch* Oh, that’s on Hulu! So maybe Netflix would show the new movie. (Before anyone chides me for being an idiot, I haven’t really delved into their catalogue in search of really graphically violent movies. They could have a top S. Korean section for all I know.)
There have been so many deserving indie movies that could have gotten have gotten a boost from an AVclub review and you choose to run…this?
I’ll probably end up checking this out, but it sounds like one of those “we need to make the revolutionaries be EXACTLY as bad as the ruling government, because HUMANZ R SAVAGGEZ” kinds of experiences. And, like, I’ve seen that shit before.
Repugnant seems about right. Living and growing up in Mexico, a deeply unequal and racist country, a revolution like the one seen here always seems inevitable. Mexico has experienced almost a decade and a half of increasing militarization. The supposed future of Mexico here seems scary, but the surprising thing is, the violence seen in New Order already happens. Franco tried to capture a dystopic future vision of a totalitarian and militarized Mexico when in reality, the events depicted happen all the time (the rape, the kidnapping, the torture). Several parts of the country (not surprisingly, those most marginalized and purposefully hidden from view) are subjected to an almost authoritarian grip by the military. Franco’s sadism is insulting because he frames it as futurizing when it is the harsh reality of millions of Mexicans. He also got the conclusion all wrong. He blames those standing up to the status quo (to add insult to injury, he also identifies the “violent” revolutionaries with the specific shade of green used by the Latin American abortion rights movement) for causing the totalitarian state. He ends with “violence begets more violence”, thus supporting the status quo. In any case, he gave an interview in which he called out “inverse racism” and how one can be “deeply racist” against white people, and how no one talks about the violence against the aristocrats during the French Revolution. If anyone was wondering about his intentions.
I’m increasingly starting to feel this way about dystopian stories: most of them end up saying “Gosh, it would be terrible if things that are already happening to the world’s poorest citizens ended up happening to people who matter”.There was a time when that was a radical point – even as late as Children of Men (a film I love) there’s a subversive charge to seeing Abu Ghriab played out in one of the countries that invaded Iraq. But today I’m not sure people need the reminders. I don’t think anybody, these days, feels like a liberal democratic order is indestructible, so making a whole movie just to say “mass violence could happen in your country!” is weirdly pointless even before you get into the specific ways in which Franco codes this film to slur people campaigning for their rights, as you correctly point out.I’d like to think there is a future for the genre, but it needs someone to rethink its meaning and form as thoroughly as Orwell did in the 1940s, rather than just keep making stories that expose nothing except how sheltered and incurious their authors’ perspectives are.
Whoa! I know I’m very late to this review, but this is important info about the creator. Wow. Thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_film
This seems like the type of movie that folks angered by the term “whitexican” nod and say “yeah, this is what’s gonna happen”. Hell, the director talked about “reverse racism”, this is not veiled at all