Punishing look at extreme military indoctrination, David Zonana’s second feature film, Heroicportrays the brutal system of beatings, torture and violence new army recruits endure as they head to Mexico’s very own version of West Point, ironically dubbed the Heroic Military College.
Despite such a name, there are hardly any heroic deeds to be seen in this cruel tale of oppressed youths and underdeveloped characters. There are only the abused and the abusers, pitted against each other in a series of increasingly disturbing confrontations that play out much like the first half of Stanley Kubrick’s Full metal jacket expanded into a full movie. It is indeed a grim affair, and one that feels close to the work of fellow Mexican director Michel Franco (New assignment), credited here as producer. Whether or not it will generate substantial interest after Sundance is another story.
Heroic
It comes down to
Cheeky and a little bland.
Shot in very elegant widescreen by Carolina Costa (The chosen ones), and is set in a huge complex that looks like an Aztec temple renovated by an architect of post-war Brutalism. The film follows the trials of a young cadet named Luis (Santiago Sandoval Carbajal). Luis enlists in the army so his ailing mother can receive free health care, but soon finds himself in a downward spiral of violence and humiliation at the hands of his overseers, especially the sadistic Sergeant Sierra (Fernando Cuautle).
From one series to the next we see Luis and his fellow trainees being insulted, punished, beaten and much, much worse as they are shaped from boys into men by their college graduates, barely older than they seem to be. are. exercise unlimited power. Zonana makes it clear from the start that there are CCTV cameras in the barracks, so the worst cases of abuse happen when the lights are out. So sometimes we hear more than we see, although we also get to see quite a lot.
The hazing, of which there are many, are interspersed with scenes of the recruits marching in royal formation to patriotic songs, or else listening to monotonous PowerPoint lectures on how Mexican soldiers should “uphold civil society rights”. Do you sense the utter hypocrisy here?
Like Franco, Zonana portrays a dog-eat-dog world made up of strict social hierarchies and peppered with outbursts of brutal violence, committed by the soldiers during training and on occasional excursions outside the compound, where Sierra Luis is required to participate in armed home invasions. . The relationship between sergeant and soldier becomes more twisted as Luis becomes both the teacher’s pet and punching bag, with hints of homoeroticism and self-loathing never fully explored.
There are no real surprises Heroic, who sets his course for hell in the opening scene and follows a straight path there for the next 90 minutes. We learn little about Luis other than the fact that his father, who abandoned the family, was also a soldier, or that his mother’s cancer is the only reason he went to the academy.
Luis tries to resist the constant oppression he faces by speaking out against a general or trying to leave the army, but it’s all in vain. The only positive encounter he has is with a stray dog he befriends in the woods one day, but if Sierra and his friends get wind of this, you can see where it’s going.
The movie is clearly meant to be a reflection of the rampant violence currently plaguing Mexico, and it is a bleak reflection indeed: if they don’t beat up the other conscripts, Sierra and co. get a kick out of watching snuff videos of rapes, shootings, and beheadings on their phones, as if cruelty and brutality have become a natural rite of passage for all young men like them.
Were the older cadets always like this or are they also products of the same system of indoctrination that Luis now goes through, in a country ravaged by corruption and murder? Zonana never makes them feel human enough to care for us, but maybe that’s his point: in a place where the choice is to kill or be killed, to be torturer or victim, such signs of humanity rare indeed.
