We Are What We Are opens with an appropriately nauseating sequence underlining its thesis about the wide gulf separating the rich and the poor in contemporary Mexico City. A man, scruffy and stumbling, paws at an upscale storefront’s plate-glass window and the perfectly outfitted mannequins beyond it. An impatient clerk shoos him away. But the man stays put, apparently becoming more unhinged (a looking-into-the-sun shot aligns viewers briefly with his woozy point of view), eventually vomiting what looks like a thick black tar, falling to his knees, and finally gasping his last. His corpse is quickly whisked away, his vomit wiped up by a crack janitorial team, and shoppers resume strolling over the spot where he gave up the ghost, yammering away at a high volume about nothing in particular. It’s an unsettling, if not subtle, statement: a man swept under the rug, his dignity losing out to a society’s imperative of keeping up appearances. Read Benjamin Mercer’s review of We Are What We Are.
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