Bacurau (2019)
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Bacurau, a small town in the Brazilian sertão, mourns the loss of its matriarch, Carmelita, who lived to be 94. Days later, its inhabitants notice that their community has vanished from most maps.
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What critics say influenced Bacurau
Yet this shift onto the “enemy” perspective, which appears to be riffing on The Most Dangerous Game (1932), hardly makes things any more stable.
One also imagines that they consumed Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and countless films by Sergio Leone, perhaps even some slasher movies and classics of the “hunting humans” sub-genre, such as The Most Dangerous Game and The Naked Prey.
As it turns out, they’re tourists, playing their own version of The Most Dangerous Game.
Survival classic The Most Dangerous Game gets a nod from this thriller by Kleber Mendonca Filho (Neighboring Sounds) and Juliano Dornelles, and so does the sci-fi horror genre.
A bloody Brazilian riff on “The Most Dangerous Game,” the sinews of which are girded with so many allusions to local culture and politics, “ Bacurau ” is that rare movie that probably would have been better if it had been dumber, or at least less ambitious.
At a glance, without any context of what's happening in Brazil, as the Bacurauans get rid of foreigners and traitors, the film is a silly, tacky man-hunting-man horror movie akin to The Most Dangerous Game or Naked Prey or even Hostel or Ruins.
Former film critic Mendonça Filho is now three for three making exquisite films about social justice in his home country, this one, a futuristic Western a la Sergio Leone and “Mad Max,” his first genre film.
Entre el cine de Emir Kusturica y el de John Carpenter, con algunos pasajes que remiten a Mad Max (aquí también hay una disputa por el agua) y momentos en la línea del Cinema Novo de Glauber Rocha, Bacurau resulta una película potente en el terreno narrativo y visual (extroardinaria la fotografía de Pedro Sotero), tan provocadora como incómoda en su mirada de la lucha de clases y por el dominio de las tierras, aunque por momentos no demasiado sutil (ver el personaje del alcalde corrupto) y algo afecta al subrayado.
Y tras la excelente Aquarius, que hace tres años muchos veíamos incluida en el palmarés, y el jurado presidido por el australiano George Miller (Mad Max) ignoró por completo, al igual que a Toni Erdmann- su director, el brasileño Kleber Mendonça Filho y su compatriota Juliano Dornelles trajeron Bacurau.
Bacurau has an intriguing and suspenseful first hour before turning into a shallow and tedious blend of Mad Max and The Hunger Games.
With subtle echoes to likes of Mad Max, there’s a greater story here that while not always perfectly executed is still richly realized, making for a harrowing and effective piece.
But Bacurau is a much crazier enterprise altogether, crammed with elitist homicidal maniacs, nudists with blunderbusses, Mad Max types who consider Che Guevara less than manly, bikers in 1980s-gaudy costumes, and Udo Kier.
(The early scene with the truck full of coffins recalls Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars,” in which Clint Eastwood’s character anticipates the violence to come by ordering the mortician to build three pine boxes.)
Furthermore, what about the truckload of coffins spilled out into the road after a vehicular smash-up that Teresa (Bárbara Colen), returning from the city for the matriarch’s funeral, passes on her way home, in an ominous nod to the deadly coffin-and body-producing town in Sergio Leone’s landmark spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars?
The film opens in outer space with a credits sequence that harkens back to classic Hollywood science-fiction (indeed, John Carpenter’s Starman was an inspiration), yet with a Brazilian twist in the form of singer Gal Costa crooning “Não Identificado.”
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The local guitar player serves as the chorus of “Bacurau”—think of Jidge Carroll in Samuel Fuller’s “Forty Guns,” always on the cusp of breaking into the theme song.
One also imagines that they consumed Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and countless films by Sergio Leone, perhaps even some slasher movies and classics of the “hunting humans” sub-genre, such as The Most Dangerous Game and The Naked Prey.
This can be read as a metaphor about Brazil (and the inequities that trouble the larger world), but like Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” this is also a story deeply rooted in a precisely mapped place.
As shot by cinematographer Pedro Sotero , “Bacurau” is a colorful variation on “Seven Samurai,” but there are no experienced warriors coming to the rescue here.
Foreign audiences don’t often get to see this part of the country, which featured in such Brazilian breakouts as “Barren Lives” and “Central Station” but has otherwise been ignored in favor of the country’s more modern metropolises.
In its most commercially successful latterday variant, from Walter Salles’s Central Station through Fernando Meirelles’s City of God to José Padilha’s Elite Squad, that mode has tended to highlight urban deprivation and disadvantaged outsiderhood, and in the latter two cases, spectacular violence, often in a favela setting.
Brazil has its own history of revisionist Westerns, including Glauber Rocha’s “Antonio das Mortes,” a classic of the Third Cinema movement that operated as an alternative to Hollywood’s cinema hegemony.
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The film feels very much a pastiche, with visual and tonal debts owed to John Carpenter, Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright, and in turn Alejandro Jodorowsky’s personal brand of psychadelic western.
A blood-soaked anti-imperialist fable and intertextual genre movie it most definitely is, it references everything from The Most Dangerous Game , The Cars That Ate Paris and Cannibal Holocaust to Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome , but the film is equally – more importantly – a staunch celebration of home, land and communal bonds.