New Order (Michel Franco, 2020)

Okay, first things first. Are we sure we're not being punked?

Anyway, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the cinematic career of Michel Franco is a real thing, something we're supposed to take seriously. I can't speak with a lot of authority about it, since I have only seen Chronic and this one. Yes, I avoided the brother / sister incest film, and the extreme cyber-violence one. And I guess there was another one that had to do with a mother taking her grandbaby away from its mother, or something. I don't know.

What I will say about New Order is, to afford it serious discussion is to credit it with a seriousness it honestly doesn't merit. I see a lot of Michael Haneke comparisons when Franco comes up, but of all things, the credit sequence of New Order really gives Franco's true game away. With its jagged soundtrack and backwards E's and R's, New Order obviously fancies itself a kind of Gaspar Noé level provocation. But Noé, love him or hate him, has undeniable cinematic chops.

Personally, I found the first segment of New Order (the wedding and lead-up to the mass violence) to be strikingly inept. The acting is such a mélange of stiff declaration and hammy mugging (especially the young guys) that it cannot possibly have been intentional. The whole set-up felt like a first-time director struggling to organize an unwieldy shoot. Strictly amateur hour. So once things devolve into wanton cruelty, Franco at least displays a bit of looseness, as if he had finished eating his narrative vegetables and could now get down to dessert. Murder, rape, humiliation: these are the things he relishes, and it shows.

As for the juvenile theme of New Order, what is there to say? It's like the sensibility of Ruben Östlund funneled through the sugared-up id of a middle-schooler. In short, Franco is so insulated inside the left-leaning bubble of the art world that he thinks the "radical" thing to do is display the working classes as animals, and their soft-hearted liberal enablers as self-destructive chumps. Only someone with no contact with the evening news, much less anyone outside their coterie, could think this is productive or intelligent. And just to be clear, it's not Franco's conservatism that's the problem. It's his schematic, jury-rigged thinking. New Order trucks in stereotypes and categories, and then gloats about its shrewd "analysis."

The only thing worse than actually watching this garbage is knowing that, when it's released next year, it's going to give Armond White a full-on, hands-free orgasm.