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LIFE IN THE ZONE
05/09/2007
To what extremes will we go to protect ourselves from supposed outside threats? To what extremes are we already going? These are the questions raised by Mexican-based director Rodrigo Plá’s debut feature The Zone (La Zona) – based on an eponymous short story by his wife Laura Santullo, who wrote the film’s script – greeted to a ten-minute standing ovation at its official screening.
Three teenagers break into the house of an elderly woman in “La Zona,” a gated community in the heart of Mexico City, but their burglary goes awry: the woman is murdered and guards kill two of the thieves while the third, Miguel (Alan Chávez), escapes and hides out in the basement of 16 year-old Alejandro (newcomer Daniel Tovar).
The residents form search parties to flush him out and as their paranoia grows so does their “eye for an eye” mentality. Only Alejandro is willing to overcome his prejudices and fears by slowly befriending Miguel, and in doing so will have to face the first adult decision of his life.
Not even the cops can penetrate the walls of the community and anyone can be bribed – the police to turn a blind eye and the rich to finance the police – in a story whose vigilante justice reflects the “preventative” wars and aggression that the west is conducting against those it deems enemies out to undermine its privileged way of life.
Santullo said that the story and film aim to denounce “a social living condition that has proliferated throughout Latin America,” and which Plá finds paradoxical. “The people who live in these communities are willing to give up their privacy and freedom,” he said, “to live surrounded by security cameras, in a kind of Big Brother situation.” Once there, they lose touch with any reality outside their own and become more and more convinced that the disadvantaged deserve whatever problems befall them.
With a message also reminiscent of The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s definitive masterpiece on social paranoia and witch hunts, The Zone leaves us with the feeling that the burden of our individual responsibility towards the ever-widening polarization between the social classes is perhaps not heavy enough.
As for the faultless cast, newcomers Tovar and Chávez more than hold their own alongside veterans Daniel Giménez Cacho, Maribel Verdú, Carlos Bardem and Mario Zaragoza.
Natasha Senjanovic
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Interview Pla Santullo Lazona |
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