A Wonderful World

Juan Perez lives on the streets of Mexico City. Spotted one night at the window of a skyscraper he entered only to keep warm, he is taken for a man about to jump. By the next day he is the country's most famous poor person, and the government decides to use him to prove that poverty has been solved. The film is not about poverty but about the poverty statistic. For the ministry the problem is not hungry people but how the number of hungry people looks, and Juan is hired to fix the figure. From that point it turns into black comedy, and the number it finally names is sixty million. Luis Estrada directed, with Damian Alcazar as Juan. It is treated as a companion to Estrada's 1999 satire Herod's Law, the target this time being the Vicente Fox years and free-market rhetoric. Estrada keeps inserting devices that remind you the film is a fiction. He wants the audience thinking about how the poor get represented, and those devices sometimes push past the story itself. Who it is for: anyone who likes Mexican political satire and black comedy. Who it is not for: anyone looking for subtlety. The film says its message loudly, produces argument rather than character, and repeats itself in the last half hour.