A Cop Movie
If you were around for the 1960s, then you are aware that many American youths held a dim view of the police. Once referred to as “the heat” or “the fuzz,” they were now being called “pigs,” in some circles. And this designation stuck, going on to become a hip hop staple. See Cypress Hill’s 1991 “Pigs” or the immortal 1989 House of Pain couplet “I’m the cream of the crop, I rise to the top/I never eat a pig because a pig is a cop”.
It could be argued that never have cops been more widely disdained than they are right now; with things like ACAB (“All Cops Are Bastards”) memes, popular sentiment against what is seen as the military industrial complex ification of police forces, and institutional pushes to “defund” police departments and literally re-imagine community crime prevention methods.
So it stands to reason that in at least English speaking parts of North America, any kind of potential agenda-having from an outwardly pro-police new Mexican movie called. Cop Movie (directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios) shall likely go un-parsed. Until later in its run-time, when we learn (only sorta though) that parsing is all we ever had to do with it. Not much else about it is so easy.
“A Cop Movie” begins with banal behind the dashboard cruising cop car footage, narrated by Teresa: a 34-year old woman who has spent 17 years in Mexico City’s police force. This information gets repeated several times throughout but not gratuitously so serving another purpose altogether type thing. On this night watch patrol.
she assists in delivering a baby because her precinct didn’t send an actual ambulance fast enough (she says she’s never done anything like this before), so she calls her husband and tells him to call emergency services as a personal favor to get the medics out, which works. Familiar situational irony. But now we think this is some sort of pro cop movie. A movie about cops that are people, too.
Some documentary elements appear for a while. Then fictional-feature components start showing up. Brassy, jazzy cop-show style music starts accompanying some scenes. Teresa narrates certain sequences in the still and silent cop car as they’re reenacted, which also gives it away. And then once the movie shifts perspective to another cop “Montoya” the stylization becomes even more ostentatious, especially when depicting Montoya’s discomfort with overseeing a gay pride parade.
Also while painting themselves as good cops who want to serve and detailing at least some of the pressures and aspirations that led them both into policing (both have police in their family; Teresa’s father was a cop who told her how to handle the rampant departmental sexism she’d encounter) they are both shown accepting cash bribes from civilians without much mulling over at all. And Montoya’s life before meeting Teresa does not seem like it was such smooth sailing either way.
However, the movie changes its character later on, so to speak, and we come to know that what is being shown Teresa Montoya partnering in both law enforcement (policing) and their private lives as well as becoming known by the alias “the love patrol,” is a true story acted out by performers. The actors talk about their research, sneaking into a police training academy. Raúl Briones, who portrays Montoya, speaks openly about his lack of sympathy for cops and horror at how they’re churned out like factory products; he says cadets are told they’re ready and given guns after six months.
In dealing with this case Ruizpalacios eventually shows that this system has been put through acid test. He starts off from humanistic perspective to get the audience there. In the end he brings out those individuals whom these characters were based upon and presents an almost mathematical proof: it does not work and always destroys everyone involved with it.
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