New Order
Michel Franco’s “New Order” has a fairly straightforward narrative throughline, which makes it all the more baffling that trying to gleam what point it’s trying to make is lost. On the surface, it feels akin thematically to the class warfare of “Parasite” and “Bacurau,” but that doesn’t really connect as we watch the story unfold on screen. We don’t connect to the characters, we don’t connect those characters to motivations, and we don’t see their full place in the larger narrative happening. This is a dreadful cinematic experience on every level.
The first scene takes place in a hospital, and we are shown patients being escorted out of the hospital to make room for new patients. A man is trying to secure a life-saving surgery for his wife, but he doesn’t have the $200,000 it would cost to have the surgery. Already there are points to be made about how health care systems make living and dying easier for the rich, and bleak for the poor, but this is simply a plot device for later in the film. We next go to a wedding, held at a rich family’s home in Mexico City. It is a happy day, even though there is unrest in the streets; an uprising of people are protesting…inequality I think? Regardless, the father comes to the house where the wedding is taking place- he and his wife used to work there- and asks for money. The bride (Naian González Norvind) is open to giving them money from their bridal purse, but the family kicks the old man out before she can offer him more. Marianne, the bride, gets the son of one of her family’s house staff to drive him to the family so she can pay for the surgery, but the protests make it difficult for them to get there. She’s taken to the son’s home, just as violent protesters overrun her family’s home.
If Franco’s film had a clear sense of motivations, and building characters, everything I described above (which happens in the first half of the film), and most of what happens afterwards, would be harrowing and powerful to watch. Unfortunately, Franco appears more interested in shocking moments than a story that builds and releases tension. After the protests have dissipated, the city essentially becomes a military state, with authoritarian and corrupt leaders; if his point was to show how no one can find justice in corrupt military rule, that might make “New Order” work, but even that gets muddied along the way because the pieces certain characters play in this story are uncertain. Franco’s ultimate mantra in this film feels like it’s “eat the rich,” but then why do the poor get punished here, as well? “New Order” is an unpleasant, unfocused piece of shock cinema (which includes potentially triggering sexual violence), and the sooner I can forget it, the better off I will be.
