Have you ever made fun of someone online for a couple of likes? Maybe you’ve liked a funny tweet at someone else’s expense? From medieval jesters to modern-day trolls, using humiliation as a spectacle is as human as it is to err. We’ve always used suffering to tell stories or to induce pathos, but sometimes — when these scenes come to us without justification or when they are too extreme they become hard to bear. That is the modus operandi of Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco: he imagines humiliating scenarios that challenge the boundaries of acceptability. Edgelord, enfant terrible, provocateur, or whatever you want to call him, Michel Franco is committed to instigation, to a fault. And yet, by clumsily overstepping the boundaries of propriety, the director often makes his audience confront their appetite for humiliation in a way few other filmmakers can.
Michel Franco first gained international notoriety when his second feature, Despues de Lucia (2011), won the Grand Prize in Cannes’s Un Certain Regard section. The film tells the story of Alejandra (Tessa Ía), a teenager who moves from Puerto Vallarta to Mexico City after the death of her mother. Eager to ease her dad’s grief, Alejandra forces herself to adapt to their new life and friends, but things promptly turn sour when a video of Alejandra having sex with her friend’s boyfriend is shared online. Her classmates start bullying her, at first just passing little taunting notes around in class and other classic forms of adolescent humiliation, but soon the abuse escalates to demeaning acts so intense that they are hard for the viewer to watch without wincing. In a series of uncomfortable scenes, two boys corner Alejandra in a school bathroom and a group of girls cut her hair against her will. These puerile rituals turn outright sadistic when Alejandra’s classmates force her to eat a cake made out of poop.
Masterfully balancing tension and abjection, Franco shows how cruelty accrues gradually in social groups. The students move silently around the classroom, nodding to each other and letting the viewer know Alejandra is an outsider. The teenagers sing her happy birthday and push her face into the cake; they refuse to rest until they have seen her chew and swallow their disgusting delicacy. The scene is slow and unnerving; the camera remains fixed on Tessa Ía’s face, who captures the whole range of emotions that Alejandra undergoes – from humiliation to utter revulsion. Franco plays with the emotional extremity of the situation to shake the viewer into recognizing how common these actions are; not the act of eating literal shit, but the organization of human societies in hierarchies that leave some people to eat figurative shit. The director shows how these not-so-funny games lead to the complete dehumanization of the scapegoat. After the cake scene, Despues de Lucia takes a tragic turn when one of the teenagers rapes Alejandra during a school trip.
Morbidly grim, Franco’s film follows in the footsteps of arthouse provocateurs like Lars Von Trier and Gaspar Noé, but the long shots and static camerawork that frame the cruelty most recall the work of Michael Haneke. After Lucia is actually easy to digest compared to Franco’s newest film, Nuevo Orden, because at least it reads like an indictment on the brutality of the children of the bourgeoisie. The acts of cruelty feel infuriating because they are evil and unfair, but they also serve a moral purpose: they tell the viewer, neatly and easily, who is bad and who is good. Nuevo Orden, in contrast, provokes at such a large scale and with such lack of specificity that it fails to justify its scenes of humiliation. It depicts a bloody, fictional uprising in Mexico City that ends up with an equally ruthless military dictatorship ruling the nation. Nuevo Orden opens with a montage that sets up the film’s ambitious scope: abstract paintings, dead bodies on the ground, a naked woman smeared in green paint, a waterfall of the same verdant hue flowing down a set of stairs, furniture being smashed, the main character wearing her wedding dress, and more. Images of Mexican society flash quickly through the screen; it seems like the film is promising that it will return and delve deeper into them, but it never does. The rest of the film shows every faction of Mexican society superficially, like a montage, for the aesthetic and emotional response they elicit but without examining their authentic meaning because that would require the director to assume a specific political and social position – a commitment Franco is not willing to make.
The first act of New Order takes on a micro point-of-view, portraying the extravagant wedding party of Marianne (Naian Gonzalez Norvind). Attended by Mexico’s highest members of society, the party is suddenly interrupted by intruders wielding weapons who are then joined by scorned domestic servants in enacting all kinds of retributive violence on their bosses. Marianne’s mother is killed, her dad is shot, and her brother is traumatized. At first, it seems like she was spared from cruelty because she was generous enough to leave her own wedding to help a former maid pay for surgery, but it doesn’t take long for her to be kidnapped. After this carnage, the proletarian uprising is suppressed and a mysterious military force takes over, installing a regime of terror where citizens are held for ransom and tortured. Here, Franco shows the film’s most cited and criticized image: a man is sodomized with an electric cattle prod while the other prisoners, including Marianne, recoil and wait for their turn. Franco suggests that all humans are willing to carry out all kinds of extreme violence on each other: rich or poor, noble or corrupt.
Aimlessly inflammatory and uninterestingly conceived, Nuevo Orden is far from being a great film. There is no nuance or flourish to the film’s utterances; the scenes rely on their extremity to be remarkable. Franco washes his hands of any political responsibility or narrative stakes, instead opting for an ambiguous, juvenile, and tired statement: “humanity is evil.” Yet, Franco’s vacillation and lack of political direction end up making Nuevo Orden a great document of its nihilistic times; it reflects the texture of contemporary discourse better than most great films can. Presenting a rebellion with no historical specificity or political point of view, the film mimics the discursive fabric of social media: a world where utterances are made not for their veracity or rhetorical value but for their ability to grab people’s attention. Franco lets out a big nihilistic sigh, condemning all his fellow humans from afar while revelling in the sadistic pleasures of spectacular humiliation – and it works. In an attention economy shaped by cycles of outrage, Franco’s film lodged itself deep in the collective memory of festival moviegoers, resonating more vibrantly better than the thousands of images that circulate the web every day.
The response to Nuevo Orden was initially positive, it even won the Silver Lion at Venice, but it was critically panned after its wide release. Its critical failure was mostly attributed to the portrayal of the white Mexican bourgeoisie as victims of a merciless (mostly mestizo and indigenous) working class. Skewing away from romantic characterizations of underprivileged characters, Franco showed servants and beggars as a brutal mass filled with resentment, ready to commit violence for jewelry and cash. Indeed, the film is written by and for a privileged audience; it even deploys the classic zombie movie trope of a dangerous horde that invades a private home to animate bourgeois anxieties. It didn’t help Franco’s case that he blamed these negative responses on discrimination against “whitexicans,” turning him into one of his characters: a target of ridicule. But it is also true that some of the reactions to Nuevo Orden were too invested in moral posturing, too busy reproaching Franco’s “questionable” politics and his sympathy for rich characters to acknowledge that the director is actually being (clumsily) honest about the class interests of the film industry.
Nuevo Orden seems more problematic than his previous films because its violence doesn’t come with a neat moral lesson. Franco’s films usually provide viewers sadomasochistic pleasures: you can either be fascinated by inventive acts of cruelty, you can identify with the pain of the victims, or both. But these pleasures didn’t feel guilty because they always came with political commentary that fell well within the Overton window of the liberal thinkpiece class. Yet, while Nuevo Orden hyperbolizes, it doesn’t lie. If a socialist revolution took place today, it seems realistic to imagine that there would be some bloodshed like most revolutions in history. The working class is not a horde of savage thieves, but they’re also not saints; they can and should act in the interest of their class at the expense of the bourgeois class. Whereas a beloved film like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite shows a morally outstanding worker who carries out a fatal action in a fit of heroic anger, Nuevo Orden shows a multitude of anonymous workers who coldly kill their bosses and their families. Only the latter would have a chance to overthrow capitalism if it happened in real life. Parasite canonizes an individual worker-cum-martyr who makes an isolated action where New Orden shows, albeit in a bad light, the kind of collective action that would actually bring about economic change. With Nuevo Orden, Franco breaks his sadomasochistic contract with the audience by hyperbolically – and unintentionally – reminding his privileged viewership that their ability to watch his films leisurely depends on the systemic degradation of a global working class.
But hyperbole loses its force when it is used simply as adornment. When the utterer has no discursive stakes in what they are saying, the exaggeration is all form and no content. This kind of weak-willed and vain overstatement used in Nuevo Orden reminds one of the discursive states of online dialogue these days. Considering the sheer amount of information and opinions on that are shared on social media every day, it is easy to see why you have to raise your voice if you want to be heard at all. In film, too, there have always been instances of transgression, overstatement, and spectacularization of the truth that aim at grabbing our attention. There is nothing inherently wrong with the hyperbolic mode of address; to the contrary, the issue lies in its misuse. The best iterations of this rhetorical device share a commitment to what they’re saying. The problem with Nuevo Orden’s use of hyperbole is that it is not even sure of what it wants to say; Franco imagined the class conflict as a rapturous eruption of violence, but he forgot to jot down any other details.
But Nuevo Orden is not without merit. The film’s Achilles heel, namely its gigantic narrational scope, is also its saving grace. The film offers a kind of social realism that is not common in Hollywood or even arthouse films, as most narrative cinema features stories of extraordinary individuals, families and sometimes small communities. Cinema rarely ventures into the social. A good film understands its limitations and doesn’t bite more than it can chew. So sometimes it takes a bad movie to tell us the truth. Nuevo Orden is all about class formations – and while it casts a dark light on the working class – it is also one of few modern films to acknowledge the political, not just personal, conflicts of this world. Ultimately, the film and the reactions to it reveal a more profound truth. Arthouse viewers and critics can tolerate images of humiliation, as long as these don’t expose the economic cruelty upon which society is built.
