"Afer Lucia"

Mexican director Michel Franco's grim drama delivers an unflinching example of the high-school bullying phenomenon at its worst.

The ripple effect of grief spreads through ever-darkening waters in Mexican writer-director Michel Franco’s disturbing second feature. More than the loss referenced in the title, however, After Lucia is about bullying, reflecting on how the crippling isolation of adolescence creates ideal prey in a culture of violence. The brutal drama packs a wallop, but despite its topicality, is probably too dour and unrelenting to reach beyond festival audiences.

The film is of a piece stylistically with Franco’s debut, Daniel & Ana, which premiered in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 2009. Austerity and rigorous control are his signature notes, with an unflinching realism marked by extended silences and a distinct preference for conveying information via oblique glimpses rather than in dialogue. Only diegetic music is heard, and Chuy Chavez’s camera rarely strays from static compositions. It could almost be a throwback to the filmmaking principles of Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme 95 manifesto.

 

Following the death of his wife in a car accident, depressed Roberto (Hernan Mendoza) moves with his teenage daughter Alejandra (Tessa Ia) from Puerto Vallarta to Mexico City. An established professional chef, he has a job lined up, while she settles into a new high school. Communication between father and daughter is strained, not from any shortage of affection on either side, but because Roberto is still too shellshocked to connect with anyone around him. This initially creates tension at the restaurant, where he shows little patience with kitchen staff.

 

By contrast, Alejandra appears to have no trouble making friends, slotting in with ease among a group of cool kids who invite her to join them for a weekend house party. Attracted to José (Gonzalo Vega Sisto), she ends up after too many drinks having sex with him in a bathroom, aware but seemingly untroubled by the fact that he’s filming them on his phone-cam. But when she returns home, the ping of an email lets her know the video has been circulated, instantly turning her into a pariah at school.

From that point on, After Lucia becomes an endurance test in abject cruelty. José insists that he didn’t send the video, having left his phone in the bathroom that night. But when Alejandra continues to associate with him, the girls in the group become incensed. The taunting escalates from texts and notes passed in class to outright abuse, humiliation and violence, both physical and sexual.

Reluctant to burden her already broken father, Alejandra says nothing, internalizing the trauma and shame of what she’s experiencing. When she finally seems ready to tell him rather than run away, the first signs that he may be emerging from his sadness and re-engaging with the world cause her to clam up. During a compulsory school excursion to Veracruz, the hostility toward Alejandra reaches epic proportions, which she absorbs in an almost catatonic state.

A drastic incident during the trip paves the way for the stunning retribution of the final act. But the entire section of the film that leads up to it pushes plausibility. Even allowing for the Lord of the Fliesmentality of the scenario and the infinite capacity for teenage insensitivity, the inhuman treatment of Alejandra borders on torture. It seems inconceivable, given the number of kids involved, that not one of them ever questions the ethics of the group’s behavior, even as it grows more and more extreme. While José makes one or two efforts to reach out to her, his silence or absence throughout Ale’s constant degradation seems too convenient. And given that this is an upscale school that goes so far as to impose regular drug tests on its students, nagging questions arise about the lax supervision during the trip, particularly given the amount of noise generated by the kids’ partying.

But credibility issues aside, the film has undeniable impact because the intensity and sobriety of Franco’s focus make the story's ugliness inescapable. The director has committed accomplices in Ia and Mendoza. Both actors deliver entirely natural, unshowy performances as two wounded people, still navigating devastating loss while the world throws fresh horrors at them.

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard)
Production companies: Pop Films, Lemon Films, Filmadora Nacional, Stromboli Films
Cast: Tessa Ia, Hernan Mendoza, Gonzalo Vega Sisto, Tamara Yazbek Bernal, Francisco Rueda, Paloma Cervantes, Juan Carlos Berruecos, Diego Canales
Director-screenwriter: Michel Franco
Producers: Michel Franco, Marco Polo Constandse, Elias Menasse, Fernando Rovzar

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Following the death of his wife, Roberto (Hernán Mendoza) moves to Mexico City for a new beginning with his daughter Alejandra (Tessa Ia). Both struggle with the loss of Lucia in different ways, though both privately. A chef, Roberto occupies most of his time with the imminent launch of a new restaurant, drastically reducing possible time spent with his teenage daughter, widening the gap between them following a tragedy that, by all accounts suggested by the film, is still extremely recent.

Though they keep their suffering silent from each other, both Alejandra and her father are prone to lying in order to conceal their pain. One such example is how Roberto fails to tell his daughter about the abandoning of her mother’s car, in a long single take that opens the film, instead suggesting he has sold the vehicle that the viewer gathers has been repaired following the crash Lucia seemingly perished in. Ale – as she is most often referred to in the film – discovers the truth over halfway into the narrative when someone from Puerto Vallarta, their former home, phones up to enquire about the car’s reported abandonment. The caller is implied to be a concerned close friend or family member, and Ale’s frequent though oft-abandoned attempts to venture back to Puerto Vallarta suggests she may have had no say regarding the move. Along with further revelations, such as that her father has turned down psychological support offered to her, it becomes understandable how Ale retreats into a shell of silent despair so easily when her peers at her new school turn on her in drastic and sadistic fashion.

Even when presented with opportunities to vocalise the bullying to adult authorities, including her own father, she keeps up a lying facade because of a belief that trying to communicate the issues will prove just as damaging. It certainly doesn’t help that means of communication, such as cell phones, paper notes passed in class and the internet, have been primary tools in her harassment, while a recording acts as the originator of the torment. By the film’s final half hour, Tessa Ia as Ale utters perhaps a sentence at most, the character effectively becoming a ghost, all too appropriate given where the narrative takes the haunted character.

Regarding that aforementioned car, Ale claims that her mother was teaching her to drive before the accident, while her father, in conversation with a funeral expenses representative, insists that his wife was simply discussing teaching her daughter to drive when the crash occurred. For all the lying they perform to conceal their grief, it is perhaps even more tragic that the loss they should be supporting each other through has separate interpretations that they are both steadfast in upholding. Roberto’s opening act of leaving the car in the middle of a busy road suggests the abandonment of a traumatic symbol, so as to have some visually recognisable removal of said symbol from his world. Keeping everything interior, the father feels an exterior action can resolve at least some of the anguish or rage.

The film’s chilling conclusion offers a mirror image of its opening, with Roberto going to even more extreme, prolonged lengths to erase an apparent source of blame. One may find some flaws in aspects of After Lucia’s depiction of bullying, but Michel Franco’s mesmerising film is not just about that, offering brutally effective explorations of destructive attitudes, accountability, and both physical and mental extremes regarding aggression and regression.