A Cop Movie blows the lid off the act of policing

▶︎ A Cop Movie is available to stream on Netflix now.

• Reviewed from the 2021 Berlinale.

When is a cop not a cop? And when is a cop movie neither a thriller nor, strictly speaking, a documentary about police life? Answer: when it’s as dazzling and playful a hybrid as the latest film by Mexican writer-director Alonso Ruizpalacios. Following his formidably inventive black-and-white debut feature Guëros (2014) and the super-stylish – but too little seen – neo-heist drama Museo (2018), Ruizpalacios has now made a third film that is more than likely to be widely viewed, as it will air on Netflix. Quite how neatly it will fit that platform’s descriptive categories is another question (for the record, it is currently tagged as: “Mexican, Documentaries – Cerebral, Gritty”). 

The film is gritty, certainly, and cerebral, arguably, in that it gets us wondering exactly what we’re watching. A Cop Movie is about two Mexico City police officers, Maria Teresa Hernandez Cañas and Montoya, her male partner both professionally and romantically. The first two sections show each officer in turn talking about and re-enacting their experience, in a vividly lit and photographed style that appears to be formally somewhat along the lines of Errol Morris’s super-evocative merging of documentary and fiction in The Thin Blue Line (1988).

We hear and sometimes see each of them talking, their voiceovers synching with footage of them on the beat. Occasional sequences recreate key incidents in their careers – notably, a frenzied chase on the street and in the subway, shot and choreographed in full-on Lethal Weapon action style (it’s a measure of Ruizpalacios’s playfulness that one reference for this sequence was Spike Jonze’s pastiche of 70s cop shows in his video for the Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’). We even get a flashback granting us privileged insight into Montoya’s childhood, playing cops and robbers with a friend, and another in which Teresa sits in the back of a police car, offering an impossible as-it-happens commentary on a past episode in her father’s police career. 

A third section has the two subjects at home, talking frankly about their relationship, even making love and rolling around on their apartment floor. We’re reeling at how candid the duo are, and at how extremely game they are in taking part, and only then, as if we hadn’t guessed, Ruizpalacios dispels the illusion to show us what we have really been seeing all along. The next chapter – listed in end credits as a separate documentary – is titled, with a Stanislavskian wink, ‘An Actor Prepares’, and comprises the video diaries of the two actors, Monica Del Carmen and Raúl Briones, whom we’ve been watching all along playing the officers. 

Teresa and Montoya are real people, however, and Del Carmen and Briones went through rigorous training in order to play them, from attending police academy boot camp to painstakingly learning the rhythms of the couple’s recorded testimonies in order to lip-synch to them, with uncanny accuracy. What emerges from the accounts of all four participants is how much being a cop is also about play-acting: wearing the uniform, walking the walk, hoping that the public buy the performance, and that you believe it yourself. Some scenes show the actors on the streets, seemingly mistaken by passers-by for actual officers – as when Briones, playing Montoya, performs the cop’s manifest self-consciousness in the middle of a Pride parade. 

The actors’ diaries provide some of the most revealing material, not least when Briones, who considers himself something of a bohemian, airs his long-standing mistrust of the police and expresses his unease at playing an authority role. The film makes no bones about how Mexico’s police are perceived, or how they often behave, with the opening credits using news stills that show officers using harsh tactics against demonstrators.

No less striking are the two officers’ accounts of corruption, explaining routine bribery as something that’s necessary for Mexico’s cops to simply perform their jobs from day to day. What that means in practice is revealed startlingly in an episode towards the end, as Teresa discovers the price to be paid for playing it by the book: accused of corruption by an arrogant hotshot, when in fact she has refused to be swayed by his entitlement. 

By the time the actors are unmasked, it’s more than clear exactly what kind of hybrid venture we’ve been watching, but even with the illusion revealed – and the initial stylistic dazzle à la Scorsese or Michael Mann reined in – A Cop Movie maintains its tone of indeterminacy with thrillingly provocative brio.