The first thing to understand about the social dynamics in Mexico around police is that they differ greatly from how the public in the United States relates to law enforcement officers.
Stateside, both the uncritical reverence some feel toward them—namely the Blue Lives Matter crowd—and the terror they incite among BIPOC communities emanate from their violent efficaciousness and status as inflexible figures reveling in a lack of accountability. For the privileged (the wealthy and the white), their actions, even murder, are justified to “protect” the public. The rest of the population has learned cops won’t hesitate to shoot at the slightest provocation.
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In Mexico, however, mistrust and lack of respect toward cops are entrenched across all social classes. Men and women in uniform there are thought of as lazy, irredeemably corrupt, and risibly inept. Most citizens would agree with those descriptors, but are also aware that these individuals are underpaid, undertrained, and underequipped. Far from being copraganda, “A Cop Movie,” the new feature from director Alonso Ruizpalacios (“Güeros,” “Museo”), is a formally daring and incisive deep dive into their performance of authority.
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This isn’t an image revamp or an endorsement. Their dirty deeds are on display. But so is the system that enables and encourages such behavior, and that insidiously forces them to compromise whatever idealism they may have had at first. Ruizpalacios’ film takes a layered humanistic route and doesn’t denounce them as one-dimensionally villainous. The intention isn’t to absolve or condemn Mexican police but to see them as a part of a larger societal malaise.
Loud sirens give way to nondescript music echoing that of the opening credits of cop shows from decades past. Soon the conceit comes into focus, and we realize this is a hybrid project where fiction and reality communicate in ways only cinema allows for.
Similar to the recent projects such as “The Infiltrators” or “I Carry You With Me,” the general rule is that the scenes on screen are based on real accounts but interpreted by actors. Yet, what we see in “A Cop Movie” surpasses mere reenactments. Ruizpalacios pushes into bolder places making his trained thespians partake in the nonfiction, always conscious of where the artifice’s seams are.
In the shoes, and tattered vests, of two Mexico City police officers, actors Mónica Del Carmen (“New Order”) and Raúl Briones (“Club de Cuervos”), who previously played a couple in Kenya Márquez’ “Suffocation,” walk us into dreamscapes that recreate the quotidian experiences of their characters patrolling the metropolis. We hear the voices of Teresa and Montoya, the real-life cops, sharing anecdotes and some of their most painful memories, but embodied by the talented two-people cast. These segments function with their own playful, magical realist logic.
Del Carmen and Briones’s impeccable gestures and cadence imitating their counterparts manage to exude believable emotion as if the words were their own. They are doing more than acting or engaging in an exercise of dubbing (à la Tik Tok) but truly inhabiting another life. This becomes even clearer as the director breaks the veneer of fictional magic to let us into how the actors prepared for their roles. Going full method, the two of them register in the police academy for several months to undergo the actual training.
By demolishing the fourth wall and including making the film within the film itself as one of its chapters, the director faces del Carmen and Briones with their own preconceived notions about the job. In turn, he makes a point about the façade of toughness that’s indoctrinated into novice officers. They perform bravery and believe that they have been bestowed jurisdiction over the citizenry.
Motivated by necessity in most cases, they are, in many ways, actors too, trying to survive a failed system. In casting dark-skinned Mexican actors, Ruizpalacios also reminds us that race and economic inequality always go hand-in-hand in his country. Throughout it all, the tools that fiction puts at his and cinematographer Emiliano Villanueva’s disposal are deployed in the form of a heightened visual language to express the inner state of his protagonists: Briones as Montoya drawing his own silhouette with chalk on the floor to materialize his acute distress, or del Carmen as Teresa jumping from a high platform into a pool in slow motion.
Inevitably, there are still parallels between Mexico’s police and departments elsewhere, particularly in the expectation of utmost loyalty, covering up misconduct, and never going against the grain even when that’s the right thing to do. In that regard, “A Cop Movie” calls to mind Peter Nicks’ documentary “The Force” but laced with a tinge of irreverence. It would also pair well with “Midnight Family,” a doc about the scarcity of ambulances in the Mexican capital, as studies of the city’s deficient service infrastructure.
As Ruizpalacios delves into the evils of the force at large, he refrains from interrogating his key subjects directly on their misbehavior. Instead of putting them on trial for their individual conduct, he contextualizes their acts as part of the whole. He shows Teresa accepting a bribe, colloquially known in Mexico as a “mordida,” and Montoya admitting to having partaken in the cycles of corruption, sometimes for personal benefit, others to simply get the proper equipment.
In this brilliant study, their position fluctuates between victimhood and responsibility. Does he go easy on them? Maybe. But the sense one gets is that his goal isn’t to single out this couple as corroded entities, but to analyze how they reacted and changed in the poisonous well.
At some point during the city’s LGBT pride celebration, Brioness, placed in reality to play Montoya or any random cop, is verbally attacked and urinated on by a drunken attendee. Later another civilian tells him, “If we were in the United States, he would already be dead,” referring to the brutality American cops are known for. That brief incident fully conveys the cultural divide about what we think police should be and how we interact with them.
With three films to his name, Ruizpalacios has become a shrewd chronicler of one of the most complicated places on earth. Through his eyes, Mexico City loses the gritty haze with which foreigners have depicted it, as well as the unrealistic gloss that Mexican mainstream media puts on it, and emerges as the complex and paradoxical land that it is. One can only hope he continues to point his sharp gaze beyond the obvious in order to examine not only its history, but its quintessential problems. [A]
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