HELI B
Open your eyes so you
don’t miss the show. —narco gang torturer and murderer
A brutally disturbing look at the effect of the narco drug
trafficking war in Mexico, a follow up to Gerardo Naranjo’s acclaimed Miss Bala
(2011), both of which show how innocent people are pulled into the deadly
affairs of Mexican drug cartels, which have killed as many as 60,000 people
since the military declared a Mexican drug war in 2006, while another 20,000
are still unaccounted for, where cartels control 90% of the cocaine entering
the United States, which amounts to a $30 billion dollar industry. Both Mexican and the U.S. media have made
claims that the Sinaloa Cartel, considered the biggest criminal organization
in the world, and the leading drug trafficker, has infiltrated the Mexican
federal government and military, and colluded with it to destroy and take over other
cartels. Much like the Russian film The
Major (Mayor) (2013), both show the devastating effects of police
corruption, where there’s reason to believe, according to Los Señores del Narco (Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their
Godfathers), a recent book by Anabel Hernández and Roberto Saviano, the
author of Gomorrah, that Mexico’s war
on drugs is a big lie, as they don’t believe the government is fighting the
cartels, linking the violence of the cartels to the leadership of the Mexican
state, which in the eyes of the public are indistinguishable. According to Saviano’s forward to the book, “Narcoland shows how contemporary
capitalism is in no position to renounce the mafia. Because it is not the mafia that has
transformed itself into a modern capitalist enterprise, it is capitalism that
has transformed itself into a mafia. The
rules of drug trafficking that Anabel Hernández describes are also the rules of
capitalism.” Initially driven by
personal outrage, the father of Ms. Hernández was kidnapped in 2000, where the
Mexico City police would only investigate if they were paid, which the family
refused to do, where her father was subsequently found murdered. When Ms. Hernández began writing about the
violence of the drug cartels, she has received boxes of dead animals left at
her doorstep, where Mexico is the fourth most deadly country for reporters,
topped only by Syria, Somalia, and Pakistan.
Amat Escalante worked as an assistant director to Carlos
Reygadas in BATTLE OF HEAVEN (2005), becoming close friends afterwards, where
Reygadas is listed as a producer of several Escalante films, including this one
which won the Best Director prize at Cannes, following Reygadas who won the
exact same award the year before with 2012
Top Ten List #2 Post Tenebras Lux (2012).
A picture of grim hopelessness, the film is set in the Guanajuato region
of central Mexico, one of the more lawless, crime-ridden regions, seen as an
arid desert of unending emptiness, where Escalante captures the squalidness of
Mexico’s drug war in the opening scene, an extended sequence that shows two bound
and gagged men laying face down in the back of a pickup truck, with a mud-covered
boot stepping on a man’s bloodied face with tape covering his mouth. They stop at a bridge with a pedestrian
crossing over the highway, quickly hauling a man’s body up the stairs where he
is strung up and left for dead, hung by his neck with his hands tied behind his
back in a public execution, a picture of mafia retribution, reminiscent of
Mussolini and other Fascists executed at the end of the war, a humiliating act
of revenge meant to discourage other Fascists from continuing the fight. The film then backtracks to events leading up
to the execution, where Heli (Armando Espitia) is a young factory worker at a
nearby auto plant living with his father, both working different shifts, also
his 12-year old sister Estela (Andrea Vergara), his wife Sabina (Linda
González) and their baby. A portrait of
bleak lives, trouble starts when Estela develops a crush on the first boy she
meets, the much older Beto (Juan Eduardo Palacios), a 17-year old special
forces cadet, seen going through the grueling paces of intensive training, stealing
two packets of cocaine intended for burning, thinking perhaps he could buy
Estela’s hand in marriage or elope with the money earned by selling the confiscated
drugs. When Heli finds the packets
hidden on the roof inside a water tank, he tries to do the right thing and dumps
the drugs in an unused well.
Government special forces barge in on them, breaking the
door down and shooting his father, kidnapping both Heli and Estela, with a
brutalized Beto already in the back of the van, where in short order it appears
they are handed over to a narco gang, while Estela remains in the hands of
corrupt government forces that likely sell her into prostitution, as she simply
disappears. Heli and Beto are
sadistically tortured in front of younger kids who are more interested in
playing video games. Each is given a
chance to take a whack at them, as Beto is beaten into losing consciousness, only
to be revived for even worse, where the savage cruelty is shown with an alarmingly
dispassionate casualness, as if the perpetrators are already numbed to their
own nihilism. This leads back to the
opening scene at the bridge, where Heli stumbles home in a kind of dazed confusion
afterwards, where the film does explore the psychic cost of violence in great detail. The pain of his homecoming is further
aggravated by a pair of unsympathetic cops who’d rather grill him with endless
questions than offer him treatment for his medical injuries. The cinematography by Lorenzo Hagerman is
reminiscent of early Kiarostami, where a lone car dots the desolate landscape
with a painterly beauty, or Sabina returns home with groceries in hand only to
see a stream of blood on the floor and her family missing, collapsing in the
doorway, where the camera tenderly pulls back, as if offering her space for her
grief. This is quite a contrast to the
matter-of-fact cruelty that is part of the everyday horrors of the region,
where even the investigating police are useless, requesting sexual favors from
Heli in return for cooperation in finding his sister, who eventually wanders
home on her own accord, pregnant and severely traumatized. The portrait is one of a system thoroughly
broken at the highest levels, where corruption is so entrenched systematically that
it reaches down to the lowest levels of society, leaving its citizens
thoroughly disgusted by the extensive reach of the violence, leaving them demoralized
by such dim prospects of a better future, where day in and day out, all that’s
left is a collective, uncontainable trauma.
