âNew Orderâ: When thereâs no tomorrow the day after tomorrow
By Ty Burr Globe Staff,Updated May 19, 2021, 12:50 p.m.
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Naian González Norvind in New Order. Neon
A bracingly pessimistic drama of societal breakdown and day-after-tomorrow dystopia, Michel Francoâs âNew Orderâ spares no one: not the entitled rich, not the downtrodden poor, not the youths setting fire to the streets, not the police and army rounding them up for torture. Itâs as bleak as movies get, but thereâs undeniable power in watching an artist commit to the darkest possible vision of human civilization. It gives voice to our worst fears and makes all the good news sound naive.
Availability
Select theaters May 21
Marianne (Naian González Norvind), the 25-year-old bride-to-be and the closest thing the film has to a protagonist, actually manages to avoid this initial carnage. Before the violence began, she’d left her own wedding to go after Rolando (Eligio Meléndez), a former employee who’d come to the family for help with an urgent medical bill; her mother and brother had turned him away. But as Franco’s script operates under the principle that no good deed goes unpunished, suffering still awaits Marianne. The day after that initial uprising, some soldiers pick her up on the pretext of taking her home, only to bring her to a holding facility where she and other one percenters are held for ransom, systematically tortured, and raped. In one scene, we see masked soldiers about to sodomize a man with a cattle prod.