Pupille de Michel Franco (nothing but that!), David Zonana proposes with Heroico a dry and ultra-powerful anti-militarist plea. On the occasion of its release in physical format, back on this punch movie from Mexico...
Portrait of a sacrificed youth
Luis (Santiago Sandoval), barely major, returns to the military college to help his mother pay for his medication and offer affordable higher education. Hopes for a better future that face the cold violence of the military system, its intrinsic absurdities and its icy cynicism. In short, an exploration of the violence that is going through Mexican society, well helped by the social and economic catalysts that we know...
For his second feature film (after the already noticed Mano de obra), David Zonana takes place under the aegis of one of the greatest contemporary directors, his compatriot Michel Franco. For when he is not busy laying masterpieces (the very recent Memory – a disturbing intimate drama – or the most acerbic and striking New Order Exploring with brilliance the notion of class struggle, Franco is also a producer of small jewellery. And this is definitely the case with Heroico !
Anti-Kubrick
Kubrick, any anti-militarist he was, enjoys military order. All, battles rowed by Barry Lyndon the scenes of Full Metal Jacket, sweat this excitement for order, alignment and the prospects induced by the organization of the military corps. Where Kubrick exults from the quasi-carceral space of the camp and its soldiers, it was to better transform its actors into pure elements of decor. A tidy, straight, roped decor, perfectly aligned to highlight its points of escape, members of a geometry where the military frame and rigor were in pure aesthetic elements.
David Zonana organises – from the very beginning – the exact opposite. The camera amuses to bring out the disparity, the irregularity, the defect: even with its actors naked as worms and face for a medical check in fixed plane, the feature film excludes any pleasure of order to emphasize the heterogeneous disparity of the bodies it deploys. Big, small, dark or light, harmonious or twisted, Heroico organizes disorder within the ultra-organised military matrix. The characters emancipate from the decor, unobtrusively detach like the lead soldiers of the Night at the Museum, emerging from their Marmorean inertia once in the evening. Kubrick swallows up his characters with an extra layer of glue, definitely freezing them in the pure decor, Zonana orchestra a contrario their silent rebellion.
Even the architecture of this barracks escapes the dictates of correctness and symmetry induced by the military order. Everywhere in the plan simmers irregularities, like as many pockets of resistance – formal, aesthetic – disturbing the coldness of the leak lines. It also trolls for obvious reasons of rights (but not that!) the true Heroico Military College and its North Korean base airs for the Otomi Ceremonial Center, with architecture mixing geometric rectitude and biscorned absurdities.
And when the military marches, we are far from the millimetre choreography of Barry Lyndon : music dissonates, details close to ridiculous touch, bodies desynchronize... Zonana's camera everywhere supports the emptiness of this artificial order, used as apparatus for a mortiferous ideology of smoothing individuality. And it's devil more interesting, and otherwise more subversive! A subversion that has made it known: if the army benefits from an immense power in Mexico, the virulent criticism proposed by Heroico (and inspired by the real facts combined by the director within his film) found a real sound box among the Mexican people, came to support him in mass in the theaters and then during his streaming release.
Psychoanalytic resurgences
As Luis lets himself be entangled in this prison space where all individuality is planed, resurgences on horseback between horror and lionic appear. He who appears from the first plans as more intelligent than the one who asks him about a list of absconses, his almost androgynous physics far removed from the military appearance and the military ethos, is gradually being gangrenned from within by the miasms of this violence transmitted from adolescent to adolescent. Strange venereal disease? Viral infection? The contagion seems inevitable, and one guesses its vaporous contours thanks to these nightmares.
Even better, a particularly clever montage is played with the ruptures of tone to better dissect military cynicism from within. Press the being and appear. Make appear the sneaky dichotomies from which these cannon flesh factories feed. Acerbic, skillful, meticulous, no doubt, David Zonana is part of Michel Franco's direct sonage... He manages to make dialogue a line-up with a powerful political message, making this Heroico One of the great political films of recent years. Here's a real anti-militarist movie!
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 84 min
Release Date: September 22, 2024
Video format: 576p/25 - 1.85
Soundtrack : Spanish (Latin America) Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles French
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