In order for Brazilian films to appeal to the general public they have to dabble in exotic stereotypes
The polarization of Brazilian film today is seen through its production value and quality. On the one hand we have films that are supported by the Brazilian petroleum giant “Petrobras”, which has a similar role to the National Lottery in British film, making it far easier for them to distribute on the international market. On the other hand you have films that are much riskier and bolder in their subject matter but because of this are rarely seen outside of more underground film festival circles. One such film was placed in the off program “Forum” in this year’s Berlinale. The film in question is the documentary Helio Oiticica, a complex portrait of one of the most important Brazilian artists of the twentieth century, filmed by his cousin Cezar Oiticica Filho using as of yet unseen footage. Even though on the surface the film seems to use typical Brazilian stereotypes (favelas, samba schools, tropicalia), the author’s rhythmic montage of pictures is not a mere visualization of the artist’s commentary, rather he contextualizes it and radically expands it.
But in order for Brazilian films to appeal to the general public they still have to dabble in exotic stereotypes. This is how Helena Solberg in her film Diary of a Provincial Girl (Vida de menina), creates the ambient in a story set in nineteenth-century Diamentina, a city which was known for its diamond mines and is now a UNESCO world heritage site, where it becomes evident that she is more concerned with the picturesque landscape and its baroque architecture than the main character on which the film is based, or to be more precise, a girl growing up who records everything in her diary. In much the same way, Daniel Filho's film Cousin Basilio, a novel of the same name written by the Portuguese writer Eca de Queiros, plays with the rhetoric of Brazilian telenovelas, which is not so unusual since the same novel was adapted into a television series back in the eighties by the commercial television network Rete Globo.
That which Filho does with the city of Diamentina, Sergio Machado does to a certain extent for Bahia in his film Lower City, a city that became the trademark of legendary writer Jorge Amado's literary opus. Even though in this case we are not talking about an adaptation of one of his novels, through Macheda's erotic style we can more than feel the writer's influence. Only this vexed eroticism is not incarnated in the actress Sonia Braga (Gabriela, Dona Flor) but her niece Alice Braga who in her role as a prostitute drives a wedge between two best friends who like to watch football matches in a bar full of sweaty women and dangerous criminals. Of course, in order for Brazilian film to get the seal of approval for export, it has to have a strongly accented colour palette of rotten fruit. These exotic concepts promoted by Fernando Meirelles and Walter Salles (Machado was Salles's protégé) are reflected in the pulsing underbelly of Bahia and its strip clubs, warehouses, rusty freighters, cock fights and boxing gyms – the milieu which Machado’s screenwriter Karim Ainouz already brought forward in his films (see: Madame Sata). And the gay subtext in the film boils down to treating a woman as a manipulative evil seductress/witch who is trying to prevent the author’s queer heroes from physically consuming their (latent) homosexual relationship.
From Diamantina and Bahia we move to Sao Paulo, accompanied by Philippe Barcinski (Nao por acaso/Not by Chance), where Pedro’s billiard diagrams collide with Enio’s ideas on traffic dynamics, just like Arriaga and Inarritu collide in the author’s mosaic style, while the romantic note to the story is found in the tragic destinies of women they had lost in the same traffic accident. But here the city has a diametrically opposite function in relation to the emotional state of his protagonists. As his cityscapes spread and become more fluid, the lives of his heroes become more rigid and restrained.
In Baptism of Blood (Batismo de sangue) by Helvecio Ratton, we remain in Sao Paulo; only the author takes us back to the dark sixties, when the military junta was in power. Fighting against it are leftist Franciscan friars, who like samba, bossanova and hipster glasses, though the author occasionally substitutes the gentle guitar with brutal scenes of torture. Like Boris Dežulović said in his “Poems from Lora”, the inductor wires clamped to the penis are live. Except here the poem is a bit different. As it usually is with melancholy Brazilian rhythms. (Dragan Rubeša)
