I watched Bacurau and recommend it. The film takes an X-ray of Brazil’s future, but bases it on our present. It is a dystopia that reveals the state of violence into which we are sinking.
The story takes place in Bacurau, a town that has disappeared from the map. This is no figure of speech. The town has suddenly ceased to appear in geolocation services, as if it had been deleted from Google Maps. Here we encounter the film’s first contemporary question: exclusion from georeferenced search systems indicates one’s position within today’s geopolitical and social distribution.
In this place lost in time and history, a confrontation unfolds between white American invaders, led by a neo-Nazi, and local residents, who decide to turn to Lunga. An androgynous character brilliantly played by Silvero Pereira, Lunga is a kind of blend of cangaceiro and 21st-century social bandit.
I won’t recount the story in detail because we have very little time and several writers, including here on Rádio USP, have already discussed the film. What I want to highlight is its ability to create an allegory of the brutality of our time in Brazil, combining Cinema Novo and video-game aesthetics.
A 21st-century Glauber
Many critics have insisted that the film is a 21st-century Glauber Rocha, and that is true. To me, this does not detract from it at all… But from my perspective, it is a 21st-century Glauber with elements of Westerns, revisited through a Tarantino-like aesthetic of Brazil’s northeastern backlands.
Through this aesthetic fusion of Cinema Novo and Tarantino, directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles reveal the different shades of social violence in Brazil, permeating every stratum of society. They combine longstanding problems, such as struggles over water and political corruption, with new themes, such as remote drone surveillance and new lethal and control technologies.
I watched Bacurau after visiting the exhibition “O que não é floresta é prisão política,” at the Ocupação 9 de Julho’s Galeria Reocupa, which I have discussed here before. The very making of this exhibition is a current of positive energy, highlighting the power of art and activism to put pressure on the present toward change.
I was on the bus heading to the Itaú cinema on Augusta. It was late on a Sunday afternoon, 6:15 p.m. to be precise, and the bus could not proceed because access to Avenida Paulista had not yet reopened to cars. The driver would have to turn onto Antônio Carlos. This became the pretext for an outburst: “This is the doing of those faggot mayors! São Paulo needs a real man as mayor!” That was enough to encourage another passenger: “It’s Kassab’s doing [sic]. He likes big Black guys.”
These people’s hatred of any form of urban civility no longer surprises me. Their rudeness bothers me, but no longer shocks me either. Yet the homophobic “interpretation” offered by the two left me appalled. That was my state of mind as I entered the cinema. Bacurau is a great film. We are at war.
Transcript of Giselle Beiguelman’s Ouvir Imagens column, broadcast every Monday at 8 a.m. on Rádio USP (93.7 FM).
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