However, her analysis emphasizes tastemaking as a malleable practice: a series of conventions and decisions made by a network of actors, ranging from festival curators to directors and performers, who determine artistic value and trends as they navigate different conditions and interests. “Violence,” she argues, “has particular salience, because it falls outside of the usual considerations of taste as a consequence of being inherently aberrant.” 2 In other words, violence signals bad taste. This trend motivates Niamh Thornton’s recent book, Tastemakers and Tastemaking: Mexico and Curated Screen Violence. Violence, emerging from different contexts and social actors, has become a marker that makes Mexico intelligible to Western circuits of tastemaking. Taking precedence over the country’s social and political realities, films like New Order-notably successful in international festivals-reflect the upper classes’ anxiety about their perceived vulnerability and loss of status. 1 This tendency, which comprises productions of varying quality, is now all too familiar in Mexican cinema. These films’ allegiances, as scholar Ignacio Sánchez Prado argues, lie in their status as “commodities for neoliberal capitalism” that aim to circulate globally.

This vagueness points to a trend that has taken over much of the contemporary cinema of the global South: representations of violence that contort local circumstances for international tastes. “I wanted to keep it open … so that audiences from different countries could see themselves.”

“The ambiguity of the movie is deliberate,” explains the director Michel Franco in an interview with the Spanish paper El País. The movie’s opening culminates with scenes of massacre and one of the guests-a pregnant woman-lying on the floor with a shot in the belly.ĭepicted as a barbaric upheaval of poor classes against the white and wealthy, the riot does not seem to have any concrete purpose beyond wreaking havoc, stealing, and inflicting gratuitous violence. With the help of domestic workers, robbery and increasingly lethal mayhem ensue.

Wearing face paint that suggests a racist idea of indigenous tribes, a group of insurgents climb the fence and break into the property. But the border between these worlds soon collapses. High walls separate the party from a riot that has burst out in the city. The dystopian thriller New Order opens with a sharp contrast: chaos in a crowded Mexico City public hospital, followed by a joyful wedding at a wealthy family’s mansion.

Cine prado analysis