Review: New Order Is a Smug Exploitation Film as Allegory for a Divided Nation

The first few minutes of Michel Franco’s New Order encapsulate its self-conscious luridness. The film opens on an abstract painting—a symbol of wealth—before segueing into a shot of a nude young woman covered in green paint, standing erect, facing us. This shot rhymes with the painting in some thematic manner, but more convincingly embodies Franco’s need—no matter how superior to conventional stimulation he believes himself to be—to goose his audience with a flash of flesh and implied violence.

Other images of destruction follow, accompanied by lush music, and one is particularly appalling: of a group of partially nude corpses, some also slathered in paint, that have been arranged just so for the camera. All this simulated death is designed to echo real-life atrocities, but it lacks expressiveness and empathy, mostly scanning as an occasion for Franco to mount an accomplished composition. The director’s rarefication of such chaos, via his highly affected images and sound effects, suggests an intended parody of art-film pompousness.

That opening abstract painting is more vital to New Order’s ideology than perhaps even Franco realizes. Art appeals to a broad section of people, but art ownership is a whimsy of the elite. Similarly, Franco fashions an art object that’s intended to court bougie guilt over class inequality. As the film’s plot kicks in, it’s clear that we’re watching another story of warfare between the haves and have-nots, though Franco is more interested in his formalism—and, later, in self-congratulatory sadism—than his characters. In other words, despite his faux kinship with the underclass, he’d rather please the hoi polloi, offering images and criticisms that are pat enough for a privileged arts patron to support as an act of fashionable defiance.

With one exception, New Order’s rich folk are the usual condescending snobs that abound in your average issue film, while the poor are either cowed saints or, more offensively, faceless instruments of rage who’re seen primarily through the point of view of the wealthy. Later, a deeply submerged resentment of the poor even rises to the surface of the film, as they’re implicitly blamed for the horrors that unfold, and forgotten in favor of a rich woman’s brutal travails. New Order is about as reactionary as supposedly left-leaning cinema gets.

Rolando (Eligio Meléndez) is an elderly man with a wife who needs a new heart valve, which will cost 200,000 pesos that he doesn’t have. But even if he did, mobs of people protesting inequality are overrunning Mexico City, threatening to shut down hospitals and other institutions. Meanwhile, a rich family is in the midst of enjoying a lavish wedding, its members alternately talking of business and getting loaded. Throughout these sequences, Franco brings into sharp focus the ease with which some of these people pull thousands of pesos out of their wallets, infuriatingly shuffling the money around as if it means nothing to them. Rolando knows this family, having worked for them for many years, and, of course, he crashes the wedding asking for the 200,000 pesos and is more or less rebuffed by everyone except the daughter, Marianne (Naian González Norvind), the one person who seems to regard him and his wife as humans. Marianne then goes off on a wild goose chase to help Rolando, while Mexico erupts in riots and nightmarish military suppression.

As reductive as New Order’s first act may be, Franco works up an impressive steam of dread as the protests grow powerful enough to even destroy a rich family. This is an undeniably confident film, as Franco’s tableaux alternate with disarmingly credible verité depictions of Mexico’s descent from civil unrest into authoritarianism. But the filmmaker’s endgame involves a decision to detonate the melodramatic plot, which signifies both cinema and society in a complacent “normal” state, so as to slide into a repetitive, repressive, studiously unpleasant tempo that suggests the influence of Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom.

But Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film is driven by unmistakable fury, by a need to see to the center of human depravity, while New Order settles for smugly distanced allegory. Pasolini truly sees his subjects, feels for them, while Franco renders his characters as anonymous receivers and deliverers of suffering. Despite the film’s svelte staging, it feels as if Franco has utilized a trendy issue—class inequality, one of the easiest of subjects for an artist to decry—as window dressing for a tedious and delusional exploitation film-slash-museum piece.