The current Mexican government supposedly got so uncomfortable watching this that it tried to censor parts of the movie. But these days Mexican film is free and flowing, and fortunately we are getting great tastes of this in El Norte.
The year is 1949, when lowly everyman Juan Vargas (Damian Alcazar) is sent to a fictitious dusty town to become its mayor. His party, the Revolutionary Institutional Party or PRI, is of course anything but fictitious -- it was the party that ruled Mexico as a one-party state for most of the last century. The PRI leaders know Vargas will be a pliable tool who will help fasten their hold on total power. At first the film is farce: Vargas and his wife rather ineptly run the town and learn the rules of small-time bribery from the local priest. Far from bringing the revolution's "modernity and social justice" to the mostly Indian inhabitants of San Pedro de los Seguaros, the couple usually just plans dinner parties and tumbles around in bed after every peso transaction.
When Vargas runs into a gringo scammer on the road (a nicely cast role, played by Alex Cox, the director of Sid and Nancy as well as Highway Patrolman, a film about Mexico's road police), he decides to pass the gringo off as a Yankee engineer who will bring electricity to the town. The two do put up one electrical pole, which garners Vargas some degree of goodwill. Which only makes him greedier. The goofy mayor starts to look harder and colder; when midpoint in the movie he shoots two people dead in cold blood, the sepia-toned story turns dark. The clownish nature of the revolution -- er, of Vargas -- has transformed into a brutal regime.
No, the political allegory here is not subtle -- but showing how a corrupt system learns to feed itself, and feed off of those it once pretended to represent, is not a subtle process: It's harsh and heartless. And the good guys never win. Except in 21st-century Mexican cinema, where one film gem after another is being produced.
