Narco Cultura movie review & film summary (2013)

The film profiles Edgar Quintero, an American singer whose handsome chubbiness and homicidal lyrics reminded me of (to keep the nascent-hip hop comparisons going) young Ice Cube but whose humble, ingratiating demeanor is more Young MC or Will Smith. Why is this happily married father of an infant selling murder music? Maybe because that music furnishes the modest but comfortable suburban lifestyle he enjoys in Los Angeles. 

That's the story throughout "Narco Cultura": folks profiting from the music let the marketplace smooth over any moral conundrums. The songs themselves also semi-acquit the genre because they're clever and self-aware. Pop music history is full of beautiful ballads about poisonous subjects. Country and blues legends boast a high lyrical body count, with a wink and a nod. Violent imagery can be metaphorical and cathartic. It's the intensity of the ideas and emotions driving the violence that matter, and in the narcocorrido, as in rap music, the template is the American Dream as interpreted by Al Pacino's Tony Montana. The 1980's cocaine empire saga "Scarface" was a "Star Wars" for three decades of real-life Tonys who yearned to blast out of poverty as quickly as possible and knew minimum wage was just another trap. Yet "Narco Cultura" shows this underclass success formula of ruthless gain to be a fantasy far more vaporous than anything in "Star Wars".

A dizzying range of patrons and clientele support boyish Edgar and his more hardened collaborators, from drug dealers to American radio stations to Walmart to exploitation filmmakers. Business is booming. Hordes of women swoon at the sight of narcocorrido singers, with their ammo belts, assault rifles and designer shades.

The way the film balances expose, visual poetry and lucid analysis of two economies (the drug trade, the music business) and two bureaucracies (law enforcement, media) in two countries (Mexico, the U.S.) is to be studied. Director-cinematographer Saul Schwarz doesn't let any one element overwhelm the symphony or obscure his clearly despairing perspective. The visual style is that of a moody thriller, something I recently criticized the documentary "Dirty Wars" for indulging with a heavy hand. Schwarz's hand is light and gracefully articulated even in moments that go right for the gut.

Present for many such moments is the film's other leading man, CSI investigator Richi Soto. Richi's beat and hometown happens to be the epicenter of Mexico's drug war, Juarez, Mexico. He refuses to leave, even as the death toll rises absurdly and his colleagues keep falling to cartel assassins on their way home from work. His reasons are partly sentimental (expressed softly in voiceover narration), partly practical (investigating drug war murders is one of the few "good" jobs left). The film intercuts Soto's investigations and Quintero's rise in the narcocorrido world. Hollywood premieres and sold out concerts share screen time with gruesome autopsies and mothers of cartel victims wailing behind police tape. Schwarz's instinct for light and composition give his cinema verite the punch of a great graphic novel. Editors Bryan Chang and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg assemble these images with efficiency that doesn't undercut the content's resonance—a righteous slickness.