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Grasshopper Film<\/p>\n
A scene from Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho\u2019s Pictures of Ghosts, 2023<\/p>\n
Only a cinephile\u2014a real film nerd\u2014could think this way, so it\u2019s a good thing that Mendon\u00e7a is unabashed. John Carpenter is one of his heroes. Bacurau (2019), a pulpy anticolonial western about villagers forced to retaliate against a group of tourists who mean to hunt them for sport, uses a synth track credited to the American director; the town\u2019s school is called \u201cJo\u00e3o Carpinteiro.\u201d In Neighboring Sounds we get Hitchcock-style voyeurism and Hanekian unease; Braga channels Bette Davis in Aquarius (2016), a feminist melodrama that doubles as a haunted house film.<\/p>\n
Mendon\u00e7a is not exactly a critic-turned-filmmaker in the same spirit as the directors of the French New Wave, who in their early years tended to translate reality itself into the language and history of the movies. Since at least the 1920s, Brazil\u2019s modernist avant-garde has made a practice of antrop\u00f3fagio\u2014the \u201ccannibalizing\u201d of foreign influences to create a kind of utopian synthesis. If Mendon\u00e7a\u2019s perception of his homeland as a chaotic and alluring shadow world proves well suited to the stylized aesthetics of Western genre films, his ravenously referential cinema also appropriates those genres to transmit a reality in which northern Brazil and its people hold the center.<\/p>\n
This is not a modest undertaking. The varied forms and figures that course through Mendon\u00e7a\u2019s films stand as something of a corrective to the idea that Brazil, with its immense diversity and deep social contradictions, could ever be pinned down. No single consciousness can carry the weight of the country\u2019s history. But the past can still be put to liberatory ends. In the final images of Bacurau the townspeople\u2014Black and brown, old and young\u2014have vanquished their imperialist invaders and now stare grimly at their final victim, the group\u2019s leader (the late Udo Kier), as they bury him alive in an underground cellar. Their clothes stained with blood, they brandish the weapons they\u2019ve retrieved from their local history museum, which keeps a record of past invasions and acts of resistance. These collective memories aren\u2019t fuzzy and nostalgic; they\u2019re a means of survival.<\/p>\n
Northeastern Brazil, home to much larger Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous populations than the rest of the country, must wage a particularly passionate battle to protect its cultural heritage and regional history from the amnesiac mechanisms of the state. As of last November the right-wing demagogue Jair Bolsonaro, who spent his four-year presidency shepherding fringe conservative groups toward electoral legitimacy, has been serving a twenty-seven-year prison sentence for attempting to overturn the results of the 2022 elections. But Brazilian politics still bears the trace of his movement\u2019s antidemocratic rhetoric, which whitewashes the country\u2019s history of slavery and Indigenous genocide and minimizes\u2014even celebrates\u2014the military regime\u2019s brutality. (Bolsonaro had made a habit of praising known torturers and slandering victims.) These threats to memory have hardly spared the country\u2019s cinematic history: the Bolsonaro administration doubled down on spending cuts to the Cinemateca Brasileira, the largest film archive in Latin America, pausing its regular maintenance operations and eliminating its technical staff entirely. Almost a year later a fire tore through the institution\u2019s highly flammable collection of nitrate and acetate film materials and documents, wiping out the bulk of the Embrafilme archive.<\/p>\n
Less spectacular but comparably devastating is the destruction wrought by the country\u2019s aggressive modernization schemes. Tasked by federal and municipal authorities with upgrading infrastructure in Brazil\u2019s major cities, public and private companies have launched \u201curban renewal\u201d projects with a priority on commercial growth and the comfort of the middle class. Public gathering spaces are being slowly eliminated: loiterers and miscreants scare off the tourists. For a sentimental Recifense like Mendon\u00e7a this sort of development amounts to a kind of hostile takeover: in Aquarius the mighty Braga plays a retired music journalist who resists the mercenary real estate developers scheming to force her out of the beachside apartment she\u2019s inhabited for several decades.<\/p>\n
Atlaspix\/Alamy Stock Photo<\/p>\n S\u00f4nia Braga as Clara in Kleber Mendon\u00e7a Filho\u2019s Aquarius, 2016<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not all rage and handwringing. Mendon\u00e7a is as interested in safeguarding the past as he is in mourning it. A howling Weimaraner named Nico, an infamous presence on Mendon\u00e7a\u2019s real-life residential block, attains immortality in Neighboring Sounds, while Pictures of Ghosts preserves downtown Recife\u2019s shuttered cinema palaces in amber, juxtaposing footage of the theaters in their prime with shots of the churches and shopping malls they became. Braga\u2019s Clara, for her part, knows that her apartment will no longer host the kinds of bustling family reunions captured in the film\u2019s prelude, when her husband was still alive and her children still young. There\u2019s an academic quality to Mendon\u00e7a\u2019s treatment of history, but there\u2019s an intimacy, too, in his attention to odd details and his impressionable archivist\u2019s mind. \u201cIt may seem like I\u2019m talking about methodology,\u201d Mendon\u00e7a says in voiceover at one point in Pictures of Ghosts. \u201cBut I\u2019m talking about love.\u201d<\/p>\n Truth, not facts, is important here. Mendon\u00e7a\u2019s work at once memorializes endangered Brazilian social dynamics and mythologizes them, filtering them through the intuitive registers of style and genre. For all the brooding naturalism of Moura\u2019s performance, Armando has the cool swagger of a Steve McQueen. He enters The Secret Agent like a tropical outlaw, pulling into a desolate gas station wearing aviator sunglasses, leather sandals, and a half-buttoned shirt. (That US audiences are likely to know Moura from his beefy role as Pablo Escobar in the Netflix show Narcos, which launched his Hollywood career, invests his character here with a further layer of star power.) A dead body lies inexplicably before him, and soon two shady cops appear and randomly inspect Armando\u2019s vehicle, all but ignoring the corpse. The scene feels like something out of a western: a lonely rider, a dirt road teeming with menace.<\/p>\n As the film goes on, however, it starts bearing a closer resemblance to paranoid American thrillers of the Seventies, such as The Parallax View (1974) and The Conversation (1974). Like those films, it plunges its hero into a vast network of conspiracy and violence. We eventually learn, in flashback, that Armando ended up on the run after his lithium battery research caught the attention of the state-owned power company, Eletrobras. When an Eletrobras executive named Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli) paid a visit to Armando and his team, he openly insulted them\u2014the northeast being a backwater undeserving of investment\u2014even as he tried to usurp their research for the company\u2019s gain. Armando and his wife F\u00e1tima (Alice Carvalho) refused to give in, and soon F\u00e1tima died mysteriously, forcing Armando to flee to Recife for safe haven under the alias Marcelo. All this emerges only halfway through the film, when Armando recounts his past to Elza (Maria Fernanda C\u00e2ndido), a member of the resistance\u2014though \u201cresistance\u201d is perhaps too concrete a term to describe the loosely associated group of good samaritans leading Armando through the dark.<\/p>\n
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