After Lucia (Michel Franco, 2012) (Patreon)

Michel Franco is not Michael Haneke. This strikes me as an obvious enough point that I really shouldn't need to articulate it, but everywhere I look, it seems that critics and programmers insist on explaining Franco as Mexico's answer to Haneke, as "Hanekesque." This is absurd. And I say this as an admirer of Michael Haneke, but certainly not his biggest fan. (He has made more films I strongly dislike than ones I love, something that I certainly cannot say for Franco, who appears to only make turds.)

For better or worse, Haneke is a moralist, at times even a scold. He is influenced by the media philosophy of Theodor Adorno, which is actually kind of funny, since Adorno would have hated Haneke's films. Still, Haneke conceives of his work as a kind of anti-cinema, in that it either promises certain lurid payoffs and denies them, or it delivers those lurid payoffs while implicating the viewer, making him or her (mostly him) feel like a degenerate for even being in the same room while the celluloid unspools.

Franco, meanwhile, is a pervert. More specifically, he is Haneke in reverse. He creates situations of obvious turpitude -- forced incest, elder abuse, murder, rape -- so that we know full well what side of the fence we are supposed to be on. There is no ambiguity in Franco's films. (I guess he's getting praise for his latest, New Order, because it has the outward sheen of ambiguity, but in actuality it's a vote for nihilism, with everyone equally bankrupt and deserving of their fate.) 

So when we watch the subjects of Franco's films undergo abuse, we don't really feel for them. I mean, I suppose we might feel the typical frustration one feels when watching an "idiot plot," when a situation could be ended simply by alerting a parent or avoiding one simple decision. But, to take After Lucia as a prime example, Franco takes cinematic delight in staging scenes in which his protagonist (Tessa Ía) is forced to eat shit, or is gang-raped in the bathroom, or pissed on. And since the moral parameters of this world are already set (bullying is bad!), After Lucia is inviting us to take guilty pleasure in watching this young girl be sexually humiliated. Franco wants to prove to us that we are perverts too.

The final shot of After Lucia -- so like Haneke! -- is actually a direct ripoff of Funny Games. That film was about violent anarchy as a force that disrupts bourgeois pleasure. In the end, Franco's film is about a young girl's rape as little more than a father's symbolic castration. This is art cinema for the knuckle-dragger set.