B+Directed by Shaul Schwarz Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Within the bloody and ongoing Mexican drug war, there are hundreds of angles for journalists and documentarians to find human drama and misery. Director Shaul Schwarz finds an ouroboros of violence in Narco Cultura, a shocking and powerful film that refuses to blink from the active war zone across the US’s southern border. Overlooking the city of El Paso, where a handful of murders are committed each year in one of America’s safest cities, lies Ciudad Juarez, a metropolis with overflowing morgues in the aftermath of cartel violence and government crackdowns. Feeding and reinforcing this violence are narcocorridos, the equivalent of folk singers who mythologize cartel figures through albums that can be purchased at the local Walmart. Schwarz splits his time between narcocorrido group Buknas de Culiacan and morgue workers in Juarez, often juxtaposing the band’s braggadocio with a smash cut to horrific violence and gore on the Juarez streets. It’s a blunt tactic, but a cruelly effective one. American consumers of news have been so shielded to real-world violence despite nearing the third decade of forever war that to see the results face down in the dirt is cold slap of harsh reality.
Schwarz’s editing tactics put Buknas de Culiacan in a damning light that nears Tipper-Gore-style scolding. His time with the morgue workers calls to mind the old hacky saw about the true heroes toiling under the radar with no stadium crowds cheering their exploits. Buried in an endless stream of work, they do what they can and then put on masks to leave the office, as their work to piece together any evidence has put them on kill lists. When a colleague is murdered, Schwarz is there to watch the workers enact a farewell ceremony with the practiced precision of a ritual that they’ve had to do too many times. He follows one worker north of the border to a Texas mall, gleaming and white and safe. There’s peace in something as simple as descending an escalator, and the worker understands this and is pulled towards it, but it’s just not his home. With new clothes in tow, he crosses the border back into Juarez, hoping to get through another week.
Narco Cultura was released in 2013, and while Juarez has experienced a decline in murders, Mexico as a whole is chugging along as a meat grinder where an estimated 200,000 people have been killed since this iteration of violence kicked off in 2006. Documentarians like Schwarz, and others like Matthew Heineman with his oft-superb Cartel Land, are needed to turn those numbers into people instead of distant abstractions unworthy of attention. In a chilling final coda, a cemetery owner points out all the land he’s got cordoned off for expansion, as well as singling out the lavish monuments dead cartel members have erected for themselves. Like the ostentatious Easter Island statues whose production deforested and devastated the island, so do the narcos extol their ‘heroics’ while devastating their homeland. B+
Narco Cultura was released in 2013, and while Juarez has experienced a decline in murders, Mexico as a whole is chugging along as a meat grinder where an estimated 200,000 people have been killed since this iteration of violence kicked off in 2006. Documentarians like Schwarz, and others like Matthew Heineman with his oft-superb Cartel Land, are needed to turn those numbers into people instead of distant abstractions unworthy of attention. In a chilling final coda, a cemetery owner points out all the land he’s got cordoned off for expansion, as well as singling out the lavish monuments dead cartel members have erected for themselves. Like the ostentatious Easter Island statues whose production deforested and devastated the island, so do the narcos extol their ‘heroics’ while devastating their homeland. B+
RSS Feed