Herod's Law

Mexico, 1949. After the mayor of a small town is lynched, the ruling party appoints someone who will disturb nobody: Juan Vargas, an honest, simple man working at a scrapyard. Vargas genuinely starts out in good faith. Then he discovers the town's treasury is empty and that the law sits in his hands as a book and a gun. The subject is not corruption but the fact that corruption can be taught. Vargas is not a bad man; at every step the system leaves him one road, and each time he takes it a little more comfortably. Set the man at the start beside the man at the end and you see how quietly the change happened. The form is black comedy; the violence is sudden and the humour merciless. The period design is careful, but the film is not nostalgic, it uses the past as an accusation about the present. The production went directly after the party that held power in Mexico for seventy years, and a major controversy broke out when the state-backed institute tried to block its release. The film eventually opened and is regarded as a turning point for the country's political cinema. Luis Estrada directs, with Damián Alcázar as Vargas. Who it is for: viewers who like political satire and Latin American cinema. Who it is not for: anyone watching without the local political background; some of the jokes point straight at Mexican history.