Michel Franco’s NEW ORDER (NUEVO ORDEN) is a brutal cautionary tale of how quickly a society can descend into violence and oppression. However, although Franco is an intelligent observer of the chaos he scripts, the balance of the film tips away from insight and commentary towards narrative brutality. He loses some of the grander points of NEW ORDER in a nihilistic spray of blood and green paint.
The film centres initially on Marian (Naian González Norvind), the daughter of a wealthy Mexican businessman, and her wedding held in the (expansive) family home. The wedding party and guests are waiting for the arrival of a judge to officiate the ceremony; he is late as a protest is brewing and blockading streets, protesters daubing symbols of the wealthy and corrupt elite with green paint. The injured from the protest overrun the local hospital where Rolando (Eligio Meléndez) is at his wife’s bedside. When she is turned away for a crucial operation, he goes to her former employers – Marian’s wealthy family – to ask for financial help. The stage is set for a story that plays out a commentary, with both the personal scale drama and the broader societal backdrop. Marian will encounter the protests directly when she seemingly takes it upon herself to help Rolando, her car windshield engulfed by that green paint.
The opening act of the film is the strongest, down to the performances of Eligio Meléndez and Naian González Norvind. As the put-upon Rolando, Meléndez elicits sympathy with his soft-spoken appearance at the household. González Norvind manages this on the flip side of the coin – she successfully conveys a conscience despite her enormous privilege established in the opening scenes. The film successfully generates tone with the visuals: the camera lingers on Rolando as he is given pitiful levels of help from the family; as Marian drives towards the protests the car-bound camera generates a feeling of escalating and approaching disaster.
Franco executes a handbrake turn in tone as the protests gather steam, at which point the somewhat opaque opening of flashing images – with a recurring green paint motif – become clearer. Although this is a shocking turn, it brings the micro and macro strands together in a brutally effective way. However, it becomes clear this is also when the film begins to lose its way slightly – jettisoning the well-drawn figures of the opening act for a broader focus and a more expansive view. A time jump follows to view the effects of this revolution several weeks on, and by this point detail and nuance are necessarily replaced with more narratively simplistic events. The brutality of many of them does not fit well with that reduced complexity of presentation.
NEW ORDER does not end up diluted with this pulled-back view – quite the opposite. The strong and concentrated message, however, lacks the depth and layered approach hinted at in that opening stretch. The film lingers on the Mexican flag, eager to extrapolate from the corruption and inequality rife in nation-states beyond the director’s native one. The consequences, however, are lost in a more removed horror even when established characters are the victims of it. There is only so much duality conveyed with the use of green – the colour of envy – symbolising the uprising in the film.
Much like the film’s society, NEW ORDER establishes a new and more oppressive set of rules without warning. Here too, though, the severe exertion of power obfuscates the truth. As striking as his film remains, Franco’s more interesting angles are obscured beneath a thick coating of that green paint.