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| Matt Willis |
| A Day Without a Mexican USA, 2004 [Sergio Arau] Yareli Arizmendi, John Getz, Caroline Aaron, Will Greenberg Comedy / Fantasy |
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| 13th June 2006 |
| One of the most talked about indie films of 2004 was this quirky and mildly activist retread of a 1998 short of the same name, beefed up for a full theatrical release. A Day Without A Mexican deals with the most catastophic natural disaster that could befall the great state of California: the immediate and total disappearance of all the Hispanic people within its borders. Why this happens, other than to teach arrogant Whities not to take their downtrodden brethren for granted, is never really explained. There's a pink fog if that helps, though the movie also throws a few red herrings at us in the guise of biblical revelation, UFO's and suchlike. As you will come to see when you watch it, explaining itself accurately and sensibly is not one of the films strongest points.
So, one day people all over California wake up only to find that their friends, relatives, work colleagues and servants are gone, vanished into thin air. Cars are left abandoned, false teeth remain in mugs, there's even a leaky faucet in one house. Immediately the state collapses into anarchy as everyone left behind is now completely unable to do anything for themself, such as make a sandwich or cut their own grass. The Mexicans who used to do these chores are gone, and now they're all doomed, DOOMED I SAY. Only one Hispanic remains, Lila Rodriguez, a local news reporter who rapidly becomes the focus of everyone's attention as the military and various government agencies try to find a way to bring everyone back instead of, you know, celebrating. The main point of the plot itself though is ingenious and extremely important, more so now than when it came out even. In California Hispanic immigrants from the South are a vital cog in its economy, taking hard, manual labour jobs for below poverty-level wages, producing huge profits for companies and low prices for consumers. A large chunk of California's enormous financial muscle is due to these people, who allow it to out-produce and undercut any outside competitors. Despite this the (mostly) illegal immigrants are generally loathed and face little or no sympathy or help wherever they go. Desperate to provide a better life for their kids, they take these poor jobs willingly and accept the risks involved. A Day Without A Mexican attempts to show people just how much they owe those they barely acknowledge, and how much they have to lose should they ever choose to get rid of them. Sadly it's a heap of steaming crap, woeful from start to finish in almost every department. The reason for the disappearance, the fog presumably, is a terrible idea. Instead of just saying 'lets have all the immigrants band together and refuse to work', director/writer Arau has them simply vanish into thin air like a particularly crappy episode of The Outer Limits. Communication and travel become impossible and California is totally shut off from the outside. Yeah, right. I'd be interested to know if Arau chose this idea as the result of a lost bet. The characters employed to flesh out the piece are also so one-dimensional and cliched that it's hard to take the film's central theme seriously. As a rule of thumb all Hispanics are good, decent, law-abiding people, and all Anglos are aloof, stupid and racist. It is necessary to a point to have such characters, if only to ram home the message ever harder, but Arau takes it to the extreme, focusing on an anti-immigration Senator who is suddenly faced with what happens when his dream comes true, a racist Border Patrol officer, the fretful wife of a Latin love-God and other monstrosities. Almost every actor plays his role with such ham-fisted incompetence one can only presume that all their previous experience in this line of work was gleaned from watching scratchy videotapes of High School plays. This is even without the very biased and pro-immigration nature of the film. Yes illegal immigrants are vital to California, but this is only because they have been allowed to become so through the laziness and greed of certain people and corporations. There is no job a US citizen will not do if the pay is right. This is simple market economics and is why certain (Unionised) professions in America enjoy such nice pay and benefits. As illegal immigrants move over US citizens cannot compete in areas where government and indeed moral oversight is lacking. The blind eye turned to agricultural producers, factories, constructions companies and so on is frankly despicable and those responsible should be punished to the greatest extent of the law. Hiring an illegal immigrant, paying him much lower wages with no benefits, just so you can make more money yourself at the expense of your fellow citizens is simply not on. The film sadly decides not to focus on any of this, instead repeatedly making clear that the low prices and good service enjoyed by Californians is due to hard-working immigrants, while failing to show the other side of the coin on this issue. The immigration debate in the US is far too complex for this sort of film to help in any way, and I certainly hope that no one who watches it will take its message too seriously. Yes illegal immigrants are important to the economy, but they are illegal for a reason and it would be no bad thing if Californians had to pay slightly more and work slightly harder in order to maintain their high standard of living. Two of the worst examples of this bias are visible in the films focus on Primary Schools and Border Patrol. The former, in one of the films pseudo-documentary pauses with big black type, states that 20% of all teachers are Hispanic and that without them the education system would grind to a halt, not mentioning of course that far more than 20% of young students are Hispanic (in some schools it is close to 100%), and that there would actually be a better student-teacher ratio should they not exist. The latter has the Border Patrol celebrating wildly when the Mexicans return, knowing that it keeps them in a job. If one were to follow this line of thinking through you could also state that the NAACP is delighted slavery was once so prominent, and that the curator of the United States Holocaust Museum is over the moon that said event murdered 6 million Jews. However, no real thinking went into this film beyond its title, so this is never really a problem. |
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