Herod's Law

Herod's Law
DVD cover
Directed by	Luis Estrada
Produced by	Luis Estrada
Written by	Luis Estrada
Starring	Damián Alcázar Pedro Armendáriz Jr. Delia Casanova Juan Carlos Colombo Alex Cox
Music by	Santiago Ojeda
Cinematography	Norman Christianson
Edited by	Luis Estrada
Distributed by	Artecinema, Venevision International
Release dates	November 9, 1999
Running time	120 min
Country	Mexico
Language	Spanish

Herod's Law (original Spanish title La ley de Herodes) is a 1999 Mexican black comedy political satire film produced by Bandidos Films; it's a political satire of corruption in Mexico and the long-ruling PRI party (notably the first Mexican film to criticize PRI explicitly by name and carried some controversy and interference from the Mexican government because of it ). The film won the Ariel Award for Best Picture from the Mexican Academy of Film.

Plot

After the mayor of the fictional village San Pedro de los Saguaros is lynched by angry villagers, a petty PRI party member named Juan Vargas (Damián Alcázar) is appointed temporary mayor by the state governor. At first the new mayor attempts to do good but a lack of funds, the fact that the majority of the villagers don't speak Spanish, and the opposition of both the local doctor (an obstreperous PAN mayoral candidate) and Doña Lupe (the brothel owner), cripple his efforts. Seeking help from his superior, Lopez, the secretary to the PRI governor, he is given a copy of the constitution of Mexico and a revolver and is told that the only law is Herod's law: literally translated: "either you get screwed or you get fucked" ("o te chingas o te jodes"). On his way back, he meets a gringo on the road when his car breaks down; the gringo looks under the hood, reconnects a wire and then asks Vargas for hundreds of dollars. He says that he is the mayor of San Pedro and that he is good for the money, then laughing it off as he drives away. Returning to the town, a bribe from Doña Lupe sets him on the path to corruption.

When Vargas thus has become the executive, legislature and judiciary of the village all in one person he soon becomes corrupt, first accepting the bribes from Doña Lupe (which he extends into paying free visits to the brothel's girls), and soon moving on to extort the local store owner and all of the villagers for even the smallest infractions. When questioned, he declares that he is funding a new project to bring electricity to the village with the help of an American engineer (in reality, the gringo he met earlier, having shown up in San Pedro wanting his money)—a farce which is obvious when only one utility pole is raised; still, the villagers are oblivious to this, except for the doctor. Vargas becomes progressively more corrupt, and when Doña Lupe's new bodyguard severely beats him after she resists his authoritarianism, he kills them both in retaliation. He incriminates Filemon, the local drunk, for the crime, and on the way to deliver him to the state's authorities he kills Filemon in the middle of the road. When he returns to the town, he discovers that his wife (not blind about his visits to the brothel) and the gringo have an affair, and the gringo flees. Meanwhile, Vargas levies false accusations against the local doctor, assigning him the role of intellectual author in Doña Lupe's murder; nonetheless, it is also revealed that the doctor has been sexually abusing the teenage girl that serves as his maid, and Vargas uses this to blackmail him into leaving the town or face incarceration. Having gotten rid of his enemies, Vargas becomes obsessed with power to the point where the whole town despises him, leving absurd taxes for everything, incarcerating those who refuse to pay, seizing their possessions (including animals), and rewritting several laws to his own absurd and tyrannical whims.

It is in the middle of this that Lopez and his henchman, Tiburon arrive to San Pedro, on the run after Lopez's men tried to shoot his rival for the governorship of the state, who is also president Aleman's nephew. Seeing that the town had riches after all, Lopez demands all the money Vargas has extorted from the villagers. Discovering that his wife has escaped with the gringo, taking all of the fortune with them, Vargas becomes mad and kills both Lopez and Tiburon. Then, Vargas seems to meet his demise when he is surrounded by a crowd of torch-wielding villagers, but unlike the previous mayor, he avoids this fate by climbing up the sole pole he raised, and is saved when several police cars arrive, hot on the trail of Lopez. Vargas reappears at the very end of the film delivering a speech to the Mexican National Congress, a spot he earned as prize for killing Lopez. As Vargas says in his speech that the PRI must stay in power forever, the film cuts to the scene of a new mayor coming to San Pedro de los Saguaros in exactly the same way that Vargas did at the beginning.

DVD edition

This movie was released in Region 1 by 20th Century Fox and Venevision Intl. under the banner Cinema Latino in 2004; right now, this edition is out of print.

A second edition was released in 2006 by Warner Home Video with Fernando Sariñana's Todo el Poder

References

External links

• Herod's Law at the Internet Movie Database
• Herod's Law at AllMovie
• (Spanish) DVD review.