Across Latin America rich and poor both tend to over-compensate for the weakness of the state.
We saw in
City of God /
City of Men how the police are usually unwelcome in the Rio slums where organised criminality has stepped into the breach. Here in Guatemala there are also areas within the capital like La Limonada where the local cops have no beat.
Rodrigo Plá's debut feature on the other hand asks us to consider what happens when the professional middle-classes decide that they can be self-sufficient in terms of law and order. Welcome to La Zona, a fortress community in Mexico DF, a
favela for the affluent SUV-driver, and the disturbing context for the socio-economic flipside of our very own rural lynch mobs.
The story begins to unfold on a stormy night. A high-rise advertising hoarding just outside La Zona becomes untethered and crashes down onto the stone pallisade, sundering it and temporarily blinding the community's CCTV eyes, a circumstance which tempts three young men in the auto-graveyard below to clamber up the twisted metal beanstalk that has suddenly turned up in their limited lives.
Disturbed whilst robbing the first property they come across in the upperworld, they murder a lone female householder and two of them are themselves taken out by La Zona's private security force. One of these
guardias is in turn mistakenly terminated by a terrified retired resident, leaving the 'Assembly' to contemplate how to handle the disposal of four bodies without incurring interference from the outside authorities - and how to deal with Miguel, the youngest invader who escaped the scene, but not the compound. All but one vote for the 'an eye for an eye' approach.
They thus constitute a Lynch-mob in another sense too, for their eerie urban elysium, seen reflected in passing polarised windows, has its antecedents in the neighbourhoods imagined by the director of
Blue Velvet. There are also some parallels in this scenario with JG Ballard's
Cocaine Nights, in which a group of retired northern Europeans decide that they can do without the services of the Spanish state in their Costa del Sol resort.
Whereas Plá's conceit is that the residents of La Zona have happened upon a truly medieval solution to the medieval levels of income distribution in Mexico - both in terms of wall-building and the pent-up vigilante-ism that develops within these walls - Ballard was prompting us to think about the necessary conditions for a Renaissance: in Estrella de Mar the local tennis pro has to shit in a few infinity pools in order to dispel the spectre of endless tedium and set-up the conditions for a kind of cultural awakening, for
"the first and last truth about the leisure society and perhaps all societies - crime and creativity go together, and always have done."Compared to Fernando Meirelles's (
Cidade de Deus) compelling realism, both visions are just un-realistic enough to be dystopic and fable-like; and the test of a good dystopia is surely the extent to which it convinces us that some of the dirty smudges in contemporary life could end up besmirching civilisation itself. La Zona certainly did a better job of filling me with dread and foreboding than Ballard's novel did. The evocation of the contrasting demographic contours of this city is chillingly effective, a back-drop of chronic Latin American injustice in which this parable becomes a chokingly acute episode.
My only misgivings were the feeling that the last ten minutes did little to top off the story and that throughout the earlier sections Plá and Santullo had been only partially successful in their attempts to represent the inner life of La Zona...and its conflicts. For example, felt they had focussed on a group of privileged male pupils in order to distract us from considering how many of the residents must have a day job
outside La Zona.
Yet while I had a sense that there was some unrealised potential here, this was easily one of my favourite three films of the year.
Update: Time now to walk the dogs down the street V and I have dubbed 'Gringits'. The hostility of the residents in the thick-walled properties that line this dirt track is now that much more
preocupante. We've already had to put up with one American aiming his hosepipe at us and a particularly nasty old woman who once shouted out "
You don't belong here..my son is in the Army, he will shoot you". We live less than 100m from her home and this is a public thoroughfare!
Grade: A
- In Bruges (UK/USA)
- Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
I suppose the two main highlights here were and Wallace and Gromitt: A Matter of Loaf and Death and Doctor Who - The Next Doctor. Both were enjoyable but left a bit of an aftertaste of 'haven't we seen all that before?'
This poster for M. Night Shyamalan's latest offering has something the movie itself doesn't - a powerful evocation of a civilisation discarded by its suddenly suicidal adherents.
It would appear that the Camorra mobsters of Naples have failed to come good on their pre-Christmas boast that they would whack Gomorra-author Roberto Saviano before we were all tucked into our turkeys and/or tamales.
Certainly the best movie set in a Wal-Mart style supermarket since One Hour Photo...and surely also the biggest product-placement extravaganza since The Terminal. 
Across Latin America rich and poor both tend to over-compensate for the weakness of the state.
A genre-bending documentary from Beeb 4 in which wheezy culinary entrepreneur Antonio Carluccio travels to Sicilly in order to uncover the background to Il Gattopardo, perhaps Italy's greatest modern novel.
Whilst compiling a list of my ten favourite new release movies of 2008, I realised that there was one that I had somehow failed to comment on in this blog.
When first presented with a new morsel of food cats - well, my cats at least - rapidly touch it against their noses before tucking in...rather like Robert in Everybody Loves Raymond.
Samuel L Jackson is an FBI agent accompanying a key witness on the red-eye from Hawaii to LA. The crim who stands to lose most from this pair arriving at LAX has had the 747's cargo hold filled with every type of posionous snake known to man - one of them is even "from the Middle East" - and triggered the more unpleasant side of their nature by spraying a load of Hawaian lei with pheromones. "Snakes on Crack," as Jackson later puts it.
I find myself laid low after attending a posada last night. I'm cross with myself, for I had thus far managed to avoid serious intestinal setbacks since my arrival here in May.
Itzamná (or God D) was Maya civilisation's high priest and cultural czar, having provided it with both writing and calendrical science. He is also said to have taught them how to cultivate corn.
These traffic-slowing structures - known here as un túmulo (a bump), as a sleeping policeman (un policia dormido) in the UK, and as un muerto (a dead person) in Nicaragua- have the same chequered history of traffic lights in Guatemala.
"Si tu laptop está chilera, te la huevearán," enthused my friend Orlando the other day about the new free wi-fi zone in Antigua's Plaza Mayor.
Ah Kin, "He of the Sun" (aka Acan Chob; Chi Chac Chob, Kinich Ahau, and God G) is an ambivalently-natured deity whose remit includes the management of drought and disease.
The first time I crossed the border separating Belize and Guatemala I couldn't help noticing a large map on the Guatemalan side which seemed to deny the frontier's very existence.
Boing Boing describes this piece by Johnny and Jenny Ryan as 'a profound and heartfelt work of art...it belongs in a museum.' Not sure I'm with them on this...
Over the past decade I've had untold opportunities to note how the people that build houses here in Guatemala have exactly the same ones as the people that build websites back in London.
