Film trailer touches a nerve as Mexico grapples with race and class
The scene is a society wedding in Mexico, where smartly dressed guests are toasting the newlyweds in the grounds of a luxury home. But the celebration is interrupted by a group of interlopers, and the scene quickly descends into violence and terror.
The dystopian tone continues throughout the two-minute clip promoting the movie New Order, which depicts the imposition of military rule in Mexico after a bloody uprising by the country’s underclass.
But shots of light-skinned protagonists suffering at the hands of an anonymous darker-skinned mob provoked a furious backlash on Mexican social media, where the director Michel Franco was accused of trading in crude prejudice.
“This trailer repeats many racial stereotypes: brown people are poor, they’re savages, they’re resentful and want revenge,” said José Antonio Aguilar, executive director of RacismoMX, an initiative to address issues of racism in Mexico.
Franco insists that the reaction is based on a misinterpretation of a movie which in fact warns of the potentially disastrous consequences of rampant social injustice around the world.
He has said inspiration flowed from movements like Black Lives Matter, mass protests in Chile and the Gilets Jaunes in France, though he started writing the film earlier.
“Every country for its particular reality is facing something similar,” he told a press conference. “People are very dissatisfied everywhere and I fear governments are seizing the opportunity to control in a stronger way.”
Franco suggested viewers should withhold judgment until they see the film, arguing that “passing judgment based on a trailer is the height of absurdity”.
Gaz Alazraki, a Mexican film-maker and producer, also cautioned against a rush to judgment, saying: “The whole point of the film is to get the Mexican society thinking. It’s far from fearmongering; it’s more of a wake-up call.”
But the film arrives in Mexico at a time when the country is undergoing an unprecedented reckoning on issues of class and race.
“It’s impossible to talk of class and poverty without touching the topic of race,” said José Ignacio Lanzagorta, an anthropologist in Mexico City. “It’s very clear that the distribution of income in Mexico is very racialised.”
The country’s populist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, came to power on a pledge to “put the poor first”, and some critics argue that New Order reflects the insecurities of Mexico’s elite.
“In the mentality of people who are anti-López Obrador, [the trailer] makes them think that a social revolution is happening, in spite of the fact that no social revolution is occurring,” Lanzagorta said.
The film has drawn comparisons to the Oscar-winning Parasite, though some critics have said it falls far short of Bong Joon-ho’s dissection of economic disparities in South Korea.
“Franco’s idea of ‘ social commentary’ exposes the fact that he hasn’t been paying much attention to society at all,” Orla Smith, wrote in a review on the website Seventh Row.
“In a time where civilians around the world are protesting against racial and social inequality, it’s completely tone deaf to portray protesters as violent monsters. It’s not only insulting but wildly inaccurate.”
New Order has received international acclaim and won awards at film festivals. It opens 21 October in Mexico, though theater capacity is still restricted because of the coronavirus pandemic.