By now I’ve seen a fair amount of Brazilian films, which are mostly entertaining. Some are violent and cynical, others are lighthearted and enjoyable. They tend to fall into three categories.
Rio de Janeiro. Brazil’s capital until Brasilia took over in 1960, Rio is still arguably Brazil’s most important city, notwithstanding São Paulo’s larger population and wealth. Its beaches, its Carnival, and its mountains all give it a unique beauty and provide an excellent setting for various films.
Blame It On Rio. Not sure if this qualifies as a “Brazilian” film, even if it is set in Rio. The major players are Michael Caine, Valerie Harper, and a very young, pre-boob-job Demi Moore. Caine and his best friend take their teenage daughters to Rio for vacation; Caine’s wife (Harper) curiously declines to accompany them, for reasons which will become apparent later. The best friend’s daughter (Michelle Johnson) turns out to have a huge crush on Caine, and is too deliciously sexy to resist – and the saucy heat and sensuality of the city and its erotic beaches conspire to destroy whatever scruples he may have had about sleeping with a girl he considers his de facto niece (thus “blame it on Rio”). The best friend, of course, finds out that his daughter has a lover, and vows to murder the poor fool, whoever he is, much to Caine’s dismay and concern. How things turn out is equally amusing and entertaining.
The Girl From Rio (old). Part James Bond, part Barbarella, minus Jane Fonda or Sean Connery, this bizarre spy story takes place in Rio circa 1968. I found it alluring but kind of stupid, mostly feminine eye candy (some, but not much, nudity) and a view of Rio at that time.
The Girl from Rio (new). A completely different movie, featuring Hugh Laurie, the doctor from “House”. He’s a hapless, bored banker in London whose wife is having an affair with his boss. He dreams of leaving foggy, dull London in favor of sunny, hot Rio de Janeiro and its luscious Carnival festivities – and has one particular dancer in mind. Having been dicked over by his wife and boss, and finding himself entrusted with the bank’s ample cash supply and no supervision over the Christmas holiday, he zips off to Rio, paying for a first class ticket (one way) in cash. He even manages to find the woman, and all sorts of crazy misadventures ensue. Excellent views of contemporary Rio de Janeiro and an equally engaging plot.
I recall Eddie Murphy joking about Elvis’ movies: he couldn’t act, but the moviemakers thought, “hey, he’s Elvis. Just let him sing the parts, and he’ll be OK.” Similarly, the temptation is to bootstrap films set in Rio by featuring lots of dazzling footage of beaches, women, mountains…beaches again…etc. and not really bother with anything resembling a coherent or intelligent plot. At least in this case, the story is pretty good – and Laurie makes a very sympathetic character.
Bossa Nova. Most of the actors and actresses in this film are Brazilian veterans of TV Globo’s novellas, with the exception of Amy Irving (Steven Spielberg’s ex-wife) who plays an American ex-flight attendant widow – her husband was a pilot who drowned one day. She teaches English (yes, Brazilians go out of their way to learn English, unlike the amigos who live in our own country). A corporate lawyer, Pedro Paulo (Antonio Fagundes), takes a liking to her, and they start a romance, despite her misgivings (having given up on romance and men for so many years after her husband’s death). One of her students is a highly paid Flamengo player, Acacio (typical Brazilian football players with only one name) who is angling to be signed by an English Premier League team – he’s taking lessons to learn how to trash talk his English opponents. He ends up in a romance with Pedro Paulo’s cute intern (Giovanna Antonelli). Another of her students is a young Brazilian girl with an Internet boyfriend Gary. Of course, it’s the movies, so NO ONE is how they claim to be. Somewhat funny and endearing.
The Man Who Copied. This takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, source of Mrs Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, far, far south, almost in Argentina. A humble “copy machine operator” (Lazaro Ramos, also in "Cidade de Deus" and "Man of the Year"), Andre, who lives with his mom and has an extremely modest income, falls in love with Silvia, a pretty white girl who lives across the street from him, and whose window he peeps into every night with binoculars. Very much aware of how “little money” + “lame ass job” = NO woman, he tries to find a way to purchase a robe for his mother, from Silvia’s clothing store, and impress her that he isn’t completely worthless. Along the way he forges counterfeit reais (Brazilian currency) using the sophisticated new color copier at his workplace, and finally conspires to rob the armored truck which services the bank across the street, only to find, to his horror, that the girl’s father is the security guard for the bank and recognizes him from the heist. It’s not really violent or funny, more like modestly charming. And it turns out that people from Porto Alegre have an inferiority complex with regard to Rio de Janeiro, and want to move up there. We’ll see about that (there IS a Rio de Janeiro ingredient to the story…).
Traficantes/Crime. Somewhere along the line, Brazilian filmmakers got the impression that foreigners associated Brazil with RIO DE JANEIRO and scantily clad women in dental floss bikinis, and Carnival. But what about the plight of Rio’s poor, in the slums (favelas)? What about the crime, drugs, and despair? Aren’t we, as Brazilian filmmakers, doing the favelados cariocas a grave injustice by not showing their problems to the world? Shouldn’t we be making violent, bloody, depressing films, something like what Quentin Tarantino would make if he was Brazilian? So they came out with these films:
Cidade de Deus (City of God). This was so well esteemed it competed at our Oscars in four categories – none of which involved foreign films. Alas, it won none of them. But for a movie in Portuguese, that’s remarkable in itself. The film follows two young black boys as they grow up in the slum called City of God, which had been set up in the 1960s to pull the poor people away from the city and give them a new place to live. Eventually this new city devolved into slums anyway, and two separate gangs competed for dominance. Even small children were drawn into, and recruited, by the drug lords. One of the kids takes a liking to photography and manages to avoid taking sides – and earns the trust of both gangs. The other one is ruthless and violent, and kills his way to the top of his gang. The film is VERY violent.
Elite Squad. This features Rio’s elite anti-drug squad, essentially a heavily armed SWAT team of “untouchables”. Wagner Moura stars as one of the main SWAT team members. The regular police are grossly underpaid and undertrained, so they tend to be brutal and corrupt. The story follows several characters and covers some students and drug dealers. The most horrible part – barely watchable – is when the drug dealers kill an NGO (social worker) who had unwittingly invited a cop into the gangster’s inner circle: they stack him up in tires and douse him with gasoline, burning him alive.
Manda Bala (Send a Bullet). This is a documentary on corruption and crime in Brazil, focusing on a network of illicit frog farms in the north of the country and an egregiously corrupt governor; and the scourge of kidnapping in São Paulo. The kidnappers cut off their victims’ fingers and ears and send them to the families to encourage ransom. Flush with their ill-gotten ransom cash, they frequently “share the wealth” with their fellow favelados, modern-day Robin Hoods stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. There’s not much actual violence, but the segments about reconstructive surgery, to “rebuild” an ear for a rich girl who had hers cut off completely by a kidnapper, are somewhat gruesome. It’s not a pretty story.
Bus 174. This is a documentary in Portuguese with English subtitles, regarding an incident which took place in Rio de Janeiro in June 2000, just two weeks before I arrived there on my first trip. A homeless man, Sandro de Nascimento, hijacked a bus along the main street which goes past the Jardin Botanico. All 7-8 passengers on the bus were women. He held them hostage for several hours. The bus was quickly surrounded not only by police and SWAT teams, but also TV news media. They interview the women on the bus, Sandro’s aunt, his adopted mother, various street kids who knew him, various journalists, a drug dealer, and some cops.
Eventually Sandro got off the bus with one of the women, and a cop charged him, shooting at point blank range. Not only did he miss Sandro, he HIT the hostage! D’oh! (Chief Wiggums in SWAT gear). For his part, Sandro shot the woman 3 times, so she died practically on the spot. Then the crowd, a mob, was about to lynch Sandro himself (no one was impressed that the police didn’t take him out with a sniper, as they had plenty of chances) so the police threw him into a van, and then strangled him in the back of the van. A full, 100%, complete goatfuck by the police. For their part, the police argued that they couldn’t take a shot at him, even with a sniper, because he was on TV and no one wanted the responsibility of killing the man on live TV. And many of the commentators observed that the media made the situation much worse by giving Sandro an outlet and putting the police on the spot.
For his part, Sandro had been 8 years old when his mother was brutally murdered right in front of him. He was homeless since then, a street kid who did cocaine and glue sniffing, and had been in and out of Rio’s corrupt and brutal jail system several times. A few social workers commented on his particular case. The bottom line is that blame appears to be spread equally to everyone.
Remarkably, for a documentary on such a nasty and depressing topic, like “Elite Squad” and “Manda Bala”, this has lots of fantastic overhead helicopter footage of Rio de Janeiro, which makes the city look much nicer than it is on the streets. I suppose they wanted to juxtapose Rio’s beauty with the hard reality of street kids and a fucked up criminal justice system.
The Man of the Year. No, not the Robin Williams film. It takes place in Rio de Janeiro, but part of the city I’ve never seen and don’t recognize. Wagner Moura – AGAIN! Man, this guy is in every film. Some actor, Murilo Benicio – who looks like a cross between Ron “Office Space” Livingston and Colin Farrell – plays Maiquel, who recently dyed his hair blond and hooked up with the girl who took care of it. He kills Suel (Moura), a local hoodlum, simply due to a disagreement: Suel accused him of being “viado” (queer) due to the blondness. Then something strange happens: instead of getting in trouble, he’s a celebrity. The cops not only don’t arrest him, they thank him. The guy’s teenage jailbait chick moves in with him. The local dentist fixes his teeth for free – and gives him more assignments. He winds up in a corrupt “security agency” which is more like a fancy protection racket. As always happens when the hero gets everything he wants but is somehow unhappy, it all falls apart. His associate Marcão (played by Lazaro Ramos, from “Cidade de Deus” and “The Man Who Copied”) gets caught with a kilo of coke – too much for even the corrupt cop Santana to fix. Eventually he has to solve things: and he does.
Out in Nowhere. Set aside from the RIO RIO RIO movies, and the BANG BANG movies, are a third genre which are more low-key, philosophical, sometimes a little racy, and set in far off, remote parts of Brazil.
Bye Bye Brasil. This is an older film, from the 70s, taking place in various parts of Rio: the Amazon jungle, Salvador, Recife, Belem (mouth of the Amazon), and Brasilia. Jose Wilker and Fabio Junior star in this. Wilker is a cynical, jaded, circus performer, calling himself Gypsy Lord (in goatee and guyliner) who tours small towns in the northeast of Brazil, including Recife and Salvador, as the “Caravana Holidei”, which includes his mistress Salome and a mute black giant, Swallow. FJ and his pregnant wife Dasdo manage to hop onboard in Salvador and follow them to Recife and Belem. Unfortunately they have to compete with the “fishbones” (TV antennas), though each town only has ONE TV and everyone watches it together in the town square instead of paying attention to Wilker and his troupe. After unsuccessfully pimping out his wife – FJ ends up in bed with Salome, and Wilker (Gypsy Lord) with Dasdo – he decides to take Dasdo to Brasilia, parting ways, at least temporarily, with the Caravana Holidei.
Cidade Baixa. More of an erotic low-key adventure film. Two friends, white (Wagner Moura..again) and black, in Salvador, Bahia, are enthralled by the same girl, a blonde named Karina, and their friendship is warped and challenged by their competition for her affections. This has a modest degree of violence and a better helping of nudity and sex.
Station Central. A more recent film, which starts off in Rio de Janeiro. A young boy, living with his mother, sees her killed by a bus in front of him. An older woman reluctantly takes care of him, only vaguely aware that the boy’s father lived up in the northeast. Despite her cynicism, she takes pity over him and hitches rides up the coast to the dry deserts of Pernambuco and other such states (which remind me of Arizona). Many of the small towns along the way resemble the ones in Bye Bye Brasil. Eventually the boy does find his family – a very sad and rewarding scene.
Behind the Sun. Same area (northeast desert) but back in 1910. A family, the Breves, has a sugar cane farm – and a vendetta with a competing family, Ferreiras. Their eldest son, Inacio, has been killed by the Ferreiras, so Tonio, the second oldest, kills the Ferreiras’ father. This means their son, whats-his-name (played by Wagner Moura), will soon be coming to hunt down and kill Tonio. In the meantime, a “circus” consisting of an eccentric scoundrel, Salustiana (no idea why the guy’s name ends in –a) and a beautiful girl, Clara, comes by; Tonio falls in love with Clara, and she with him. However, Tonio is a marked man, so it’s only a matter of time before the Ferreiras come by to extract vengeance to keep the cycle of death and violence going so long as someone’s left to kill.
House of Sand. Basically a chick flick about a woman (Aurea) and her daughter (Maria) stuck in Maranhão, a province of Brazil in the far northeast on the coast with white desert sand. The “kicker” is that the actresses switch roles. When the daughter has her own daughter, the movie jumps about 20 years into the future (starting out in 1910, jumping to 1919, and eventually to 1940 and 1969, and the actress playing the mother, now plays the daughter, and the actress playing the daughter now plays the new daughter. Anyhow. Despite the switcheroo, it manages to avoid being confusing. But it is a chick flick, and takes place 100% in this desolate but also beautiful part of Brazil.
Mango Yellow. This one takes place in the present time, in Recife. It’s a bit offbeat and raunchy – some sex & nudity, plus some other disturbing images. Various different colorful characters are here: Dunga, a flaming bicha, who has the hots for Wellington, a straight Romario-lookalike who works in the slaughterhouse and cheats on his attractive but superreligious wife Kika, with Daisy, a far less stunning but easy “puta”. Isaac, another weirdo, has something for corpses (but he’s not a necrophiliac) for which he trades weed. There’s an overweight woman, Aurora, who applies her oxygen mask to her second set of lips, and a pretty barmaid, who shows Isaac that (A) she doesn’t wear panties and (B) that her hair downstairs matches the set upstairs. The locale is dingy, dirty, and rundown, but very bright and hot anyway.
The Middle of the World (DVD). Nosso amigo, Wagner Moura, returns again – as the father of a family traveling from the northeast to Rio de Janeiro by bicycle. They have to make money various ways – the mother makes hammocks in one city, she sings Roberto Carlos songs with one son, but more often than not they go hungry. The father insists he needs R$1000 ($300 US) per month, but can’t seem to find anyone offering that kind of money. Eventually they do make it to Rio; it’s a bit Kerouac-ish in a way, but with excellent views of northeast Brazil.
God is Brazilian. Antonio Fagundes (from “Bossa Nova” and countless novellas) plays God, who is tired and looking for a vacation so he can go off to remote parts of the universe and watch supernovas explode. But he needs a saint to run things in his absence, and has one in mind. Along the way tags Taoca (yes, Wagner Moura again), a ne’er-do-well trying to escape a particularly nasty creditor, and a girl Mada (somewhat of a provocative yet Virgin Mary figure) who helps them out. They travel around the northeast of Brazil (it looks like the desert, Sergipe and Natal) discussing theology and ending up in various humorous situations. In many ways, it’s a Brazilian version of “Oh God!”, that irreverent comedy from way back with George Burns and John Denver. Leave it to Brazilians to be both deeply religious and irreverent at the same time.
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