Days of Grace

Mexico City across three World Cup summers: 2002, 2006 and 2010. Three separate stories, each running thirty days. In one, a policeman new to the job is drawn into kidnapping cases. In another, a man held hostage waits in a room. In the third, a woman waiting for her husband does not know what to do with herself at home. Everardo Gout cuts the three time frames together and gradually makes visible how the city's kidnapping economy works and who feeds off whom. The World Cup matches run in the background while the country lives through something else, and that contrast is the film's central idea. Running over two hours and starring Tenoch Huerta and Carlos Bardem, it is a hard, tiring piece of work. It does not turn the violence into a spectacle, and it does not soften it either.