Review: A Cop Movie Is a Bracingly Nuanced Look at Police Work in Mexico City

A Cop Movie is a galvanizing experience, suggesting that police are also susceptible to victimization.

A Cop Movie
Photo: Netflix

Alonso Ruizpalacios’s A Cop Movie is a bracingly nuanced and enraging portrait of police work. Following a pair of Mexico City cops, the documentary details the contempt that police receive from bystanders, the lack of support and resources that drive officers to accept bribes, and especially the day-to-day grind of watching the streets with, say, a plate of tacos in your lap, both bored and on edge. Above all, and unfashionably, Ruizpalacios voices a profound sense of powerlessness on the part of the police without sentimentalizing the abuses and biases of the profession. The police officers’ discomfort is paralleled here with several startling shifts of form and structure, which unsettle us in a way that approximates how the film’s subjects are continually uprooted, bewildered, and betrayed.

A Cop Movie opens on a shot of a police car’s interior, as the vehicle winds through the city in the middle of the night. Teresa is the officer driving the car, watching the streets, as the lurid colors of the wide and fixed compositions conjure a casual sense of dread, of violent possibilities lurking everywhere. (Think of a scene from Cops invested with painterly visual beauty.) Teresa is eventually called to an apartment where a woman is on the verge of giving birth. Before she enters the building, Teresa clocks a man on the street who could have a gun but is revealed to be holding a cellphone. Ambulances have been called repeatedly, but in Mexico City they’re on perilously short supply, as detailed in Luke Lorentzen’s documentary Midnight Family. Teresa oversees the birth despite no medical training and is celebrated by the family as a hero. The ambulance turns up hours later and is cursed by those waiting for it.

This scene, gripping and human in its own right, reveling in authentic police valor, establishes most of the preoccupations that animate A Cop Movie. As in Midnight Family, privatization of ostensibly public resources, and the disasters such practices ensue, becomes a significant theme. Much later, Teresa and the other police officer interviewed here, her partner and lover Montoya, speak of the various actions they can’t do on the street—such as helping injured parties—without fear of financial recrimination such as insurance withdrawal. Which is to say that many decent actions, such as delivering a baby, are actively disincentivized.

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Yet resources are so scarce and haphazard in Mexico City that police officers are frequently required to take matters into their own hands anyway—a catch-22 that appears to be common of this profession. Civilians despise the police, understandably assuming that they’re all corrupt, while the government fosters a dog-eat-dog mentality, such as requiring officers to pay for their own equipment, that virtually coerces them into taking bribes, which in essence is the ultimate privatization of ideally public services. Here, the police appear to be hapless figures beaten around by forces both more and less powerful than themselves, from petty criminals who mock them to politicians who see themselves as above the law. In one bone-chilling scene, a bystander contemptuously observes to a cop that a disrespectful young man could be killed for what he just did if Mexico City was the United States.

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While surveying this bleak infrastructure, which appears to be chaotic by design, a means of keeping police officers in their place as a sort of armed, pseudo-ineffectual sanitation committee, Ruizpalacios stokes our curiosity as to precisely what kind of film we’re watching. Teresa and Montoya are presented to the viewer as real people, though they speak of their police lives in clearly written and rehearsed speeches, and A Cop Movie is painstakingly staged, with surreal flights of fancy such as Teresa and Montoya delivering their stories to fellow officers who stand still and mute, like witnesses to theatrical monologues.

This stylization is soon enriched, and justified, by a reveal: Teresa and Montoya are played by actors, Mónica del Carmen and Raúl Briones, respectively, who have immersed themselves in police training for their roles. Recording their experiences at the police academy with their phones, Carmen and Briones discuss the overlapping roleplays between police and actors, as police are taught and conditioned to play their own “parts,” which are rooted partially in stereotypes of law enforcement. The academy is unsurprisingly revealed to be ground zero for corruption and alienation in the police force, in which abuse, self-loathing, and under-funded training run rampant, with a cauldron of motivations from lack of prospects to a lust for power to, especially tragically, an authentic urge to fulfill civic duty.

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This metatextual twist is gleefully sprung, recalling a glibber variation of the “head games” that Robert Greene’s films play on audiences, though the notion of roleplay as a uniting practice, binding not only actors and police officers but all of us, is under-explored. Compared with the long and spellbinding oral testaments that “Teresa” and “Montoya” offer concerning the breakdown of police procedure, the sequences involving Carmen and Briones and the academy feel rushed. Ruizpalacios seems to be most engaged by the sheer, obstinate act of redefining the film’s sense of reality, without entirely plumbing the moral, existential implications of fusing documentary and fiction (as Greene often does).

When the real Teresa and Montoya emerge, soulful, embittered by their marginalization by corrupt officials, another opportunity is missed: to have the cops and the actors coexist at length in the same frames, exploring their differing notions of policing, from the inside-out to the outside-in. Briones, for instance, is a starkly different presence from both Montoya and “Montoya,” with a sensitive hippie-artist vibe that’s reminiscent of Al Pacino’s Serpico, and to the see men interact could’ve proved assumption-shattering on both sides.

A Cop Movie is still a lively and galvanizing experience, suggesting that police are also susceptible to victimization, especially as troops on the frontlines of scapegoating that distracts from insidious, top-to-bottom class warfare. When a cop unforgettably says that people don’t care whether police die, he sounds less self-pitying than simply observant.

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Score: 
 Cast: Raúl Briones, Mónica Del Carmen  Director: Alonso Ruizpalacios  Screenwriter: David Gaitán, Alonso Ruizpalacios  Distributor: Netflix  Running Time: 107 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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