With New Order, Michel Franco channels a globally felt social discontent ★★★☆☆

Their villa will be looted and destroyed, they will be treated like beasts and no one may survive. That is what the white elite of Mexico, and therefore also this very wealthy business family, in New Order what awaits when the underclass violently resists institutional oppression and humiliation. But with the revolt fast approaching, Marianne (Naian González Norvind) and Alan (Darío Yazbek Bernal) hold their swanky wedding as planned.

The Mexican cinematographer Michel Franco, acting cool and composed as ever, knows how to captivate the audience with this grim look at a possible near future. During the lengthy wedding scene, he creates a constant undercurrent of agitation – helicopters and police cars in the background, green paint suddenly pouring from the tap – as the partygoers bury their heads in the sand. Marianne’s mother immediately puts the envelopes with money in a safe, but brushes off former employee Rolando when he asks for urgent financial help for his wife’s heart surgery.

Boontje comes for his wages, do you think involuntarily at the eruption of violence, no matter how sickening it is and no matter how impassive Franco depicts it. And how lucky that Marianne, the only one who wants to help Rolando, goes after him and thus gets away from the party in time. Only to end up in an even bigger hell.

Racist image

New Order †order nuevo), awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, was met with a storm of criticism in Mexico. By pitting white victims against dark-skinned aggressors, Franco would paint a racist picture of Mexican class society. There is much to be said for this, but you can also argue that the film uses stereotypes as a narrative strategy – the young blond woman as a heroine, for example – and just as easily reverses them. And that humanity, or the loss of it, in New Order is not reserved for any class.

A fine example of dystopian world building, in any case, that is the fast-paced film. Where Franco’s previous work (chronic† Las hijas de Abril) remained small-scale, he here sketches a collapsed civilization, from the swirling popular anger to the sadistic hostage system with which the army takes advantage of anarchy. Inspired by the situation in his own country, but also by various citizen protests such as Black Lives Matter and the French yellow vests, Franco channels a globally felt social discontent: after the worldwide corona protests, it feels included in 2019 New Order the more urgent. Albeit without even suggesting a way out.