The mother of the bride is quietly freaked out when the tap water briefly runs green.

Activists are splashing green paint everywhere: their signature touch. Guests have been jostled on their way to the house. Because a weird frisson of unease eddies about the party there are chaotic protests in other parts of town. As in The Godfather, the wedding is to be an arena for a theatrical display of power – but not in the way intended by the father of the bride. The scene is a society wedding attended by the 1% elite in the grandest part of Mexico City, attended by corrupt politicians and business people, with their lazy, dissolute twentysomething children ordering about the darker-skinned servants. It was an object lesson in how the “discourse” cannot absorb complexity or nuance. Franco wound up having to offer an apology after mishandling the response and claiming his film was suffering reverse racism targeted at what he inelegantly called the “whitexican”. Connoisseurs of highbrow arthouse shock will note the fact that the film’s titles and credits, with the letter E in reverse, show the influence of France’s adulte terrible Gaspar Noé.įor decades, this has been the kind of provocative cinema that has faced opposition only in the easily ignored (and maybe secretly welcomed) outrage of conservative print media, but Franco has ironically faced his own uprising from online offence culture in Mexico when the trailer’s depiction of vengeful darker-skinned revolutionaries was condemned as racist. New Order is an ordeal nightmare, imagining a violent uprising against Mexico’s super-rich. M ichel Franco’s film-making has always had an edge of cold steel here again is his icy stab and lacerating chill.

Hoi4 the new order