Photo: Rodrigo Plá's La Zona
If the insult of Rodrigo Plá's first feature-length fiction is not as significant as Paul Haggis's Crash, that's because Plá doesn't trivialize a society's racial dynamics, only its class relations—an affront that isn't skin-deep. As a thriller, the film is an effective little number, tracing in nail-biting detail what happens when three boys break into a gated community in Mexico City and leave a woman and a security guard dead in their thieving wake. Rather than report these deaths to police, the people who supervise life within La Zona decide to take action into their own hands by hunting down the one surviving thief, Miguel (Alan Chávez), in order to kill him, and once this blood-thirsty mob is through, sons will turn their backs to their fathers, wives will never fuck their husbands again, and do-gooders will hightail it out of town. Ed Gonzalez
If the insult of Rodrigo Plá's first feature-length fiction is not as significant as Paul Haggis's Crash, that's because Plá doesn't trivialize a society's racial dynamics, only its class relations—an affront that isn't skin-deep. As a thriller, the film is an effective little number, tracing in nail-biting detail what happens when three boys break into a gated community in Mexico City and leave a woman and a security guard dead in their thieving wake. Rather than report these deaths to police, the people who supervise life within La Zona decide to take action into their own hands by hunting down the one surviving thief, Miguel (Alan Chávez), in order to kill him, and once this blood-thirsty mob is through, sons will turn their backs to their fathers, wives will never fuck their husbands again, and do-gooders will hightail it out of town. Ed Gonzalez
