FÁBIO ANDRADE

ABOUT ARTICLES CRITICISM FILM MUSIC

BACURAU (2019), JULIANO DORNELLES &

KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO
OCTOBER 15, 2019

57th New York Film Festival

VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS

Burying our living

Halfway through the third story of Mariano Llinás’ wonderful composite-film La Flor (2019),
Dreyfuss (Horacio Marassi), a kidnapped German scientist who finds himself tied in the
backseat of a car in an unknown land, connects the dots of what he had gone through up until
that point and tries to imagine his fate. As the French-speaking kidnappers drive him around
deserted plains, he starts suspecting that they are only waiting for it to get dark:

– “The time has come. They will kill me.”

But they don’t. When the night falls, what hits Dreyfuss is not so much a bullet, but a moment of
clarity. The European character played by an Argentinean theater actor with a European last
 name looks at the stars and realizes that, even though he cannot tell exactly where he is, he can
say for sure where he is not.

– “I’m not in Romania. I’m in the South. Somewhere in the Southern hemisphere. (…) This is a new
sky,” he thought. “I had never seen this sky before.” (…) The stars were the same ones, the
constellations were the same ones, but they were inverted.

In that profound recognition of otherness that didactically demonstrates what ‘otherness’

means, Llinás’ camera tilts up from Dreyfuss, in the back seat of the car, and pans right towards
the sky, framing the stars. For some, the constellations would appear to be upside down; for
others, they are exactly the same way they have always been.

The inverted constellations in La Flor (2018), Mariano Llinás

If one could travel across films like an editor moves between shots, a dissolve from this
remarkable moment under the Argentinean sky could seamlessly lead us to the opening shot of
Juliano Dornelles’ and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Bacurau. The theater screen is covered in black,
with bright dots that glow long after their death, and Gal Costa’s voice comes from the past –
more precisely, 1969 – singing a Caetano Veloso song called “Não Identificado” (“unidentified” or
“not identified” – the lack of identification or the identification of the “not”), with words that cut
through layers of tape delays and synthesizers:

I am going to write a song for her

A plain little Brazilian song to be released after Carnival
I will come up with a romantic iê-iê-iê
A sentimental anticomputer
I will write a love song
To record a flying saucer
 The “Iê-iê-iê” was a very popular music genre description in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s,
following similar phenomena in Italy, Spain. France, and Portugal – where it was called Yé-yé.
Named after the chorus in The Beatles’ worldwide hit “She Loves You,” the label embraces the
misheard (“iê” has a closed, nasal sound, unlike the open “yeah, yeah, yeah”), suggesting perhaps
an anti-colonial deformation, or even a parody, of the much-more-bellicose name that the scene
received in English: The British Invasion. However, the opening song has been kept unsubtitled in
the international version of Bacurau, adding another layer of foreignness – a kind of inside joke –
to a film that feeds off that type of opacity.

While the spoken language is socially and temporally specific, tape delays and synthesizers are
universal (in the way of Sun Ra), so buckle up. The camera pans left from the stars to show Earth
hovering below, with a satellite humorously floating around it. Without a cut, a zoom-in focuses
on a place on the map, like an overblown version of a Hitchcock location introduction: the
fictitious town of Bacurau, “West of Pernambuco, Brazil” – a description that is both precise and
diffuse, like the film is both specific and allegorical. It’s like Google Earth, except that, here, the
constellations are upside down… it’s like the opening of a Hollywood film, except that here…

The film lands on the outskirts of the town, with an aerial shot that follows a water truck
speeding down a deserted road. It’s a standard opening that recalls so many other films, to the
point that they all begin to feel “unidentifiable” – like Caetano and Gal’s anticomputer iê-iê-iê.
 Genres have the ability to do that: they make the immediately recognizable unidentifiable. But
only in the Southern Hemisphere they arrive on flying saucers. Despite the stars being the same,
 the generic speeding truck has a slightly harder time driving past the holes and bumps on that
underdeveloped road compared to, say, Dennis Weaver in Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971). The
elements of the genre are all here – transported by radio waves, warships, and satellites – but,
when the constellations are upside down, different shapes appear, for something gets lost and
added in translation. “American music,” says Domingas (Sonia Braga) while listening to “True,” by
the British new wave group Spandau Ballet. Iê, iê, iê.

Traveling on this road is harder because it is also littered with obstacles – more precisely, coffins.
As the speeding truck smashes them, one by one, the mental editing that took us from La Flor to
 Bacurau travels to the muddy European deserts passing as the Mexican border in Sergio
Corbucci’s Django (1966), one of the greatest classics of Spaghetti Western (iê, iê, iê). The title
character was named after Django Reinhardt, an extraordinary Belgian-Romani-French guitarist
whose mythical skill was second-to-none, even though he had to make do without two of the
fingers on his left hand, disabled by a severe burn. Played by Franco Nero, an Italian actor
“discovered” by John Huston who has worked with some of the greatest directors in the world
(Fassbinder, Chabrol, Buñuel, Bellocchio, Tarantino, etc), Django is a gunslinger who goes from
town to town dragging a coffin behind him. “Is there somebody in there?,” they ask, but Django
never answers. When he temporarily settles in a town controlled by a cormanesque ex-confederate
major who shoots Mexicans as a sport (played by the Spanish actor Eduardo Fajardo – iê, iê, iê),
Django finally opens the coffin. Instead of a body, he pulls out a machine gun and blows the shit
out of everybody.

It’s an extraordinary prop, the coffin, for it collapses past, present, and future. Instead of a vehicle
for mourning a death that has already happened, the film resignifies it as the promise of the
deaths yet to come. Italian Westerns were not shot in the Southern Hemisphere but, detached
from the domestic civilizational nobility of the genre, they reproduce its conventions using
concave mirrors – a perverse form of mannerism. In the upside-down reflection, the
constellations end up inverted, with Orion “holding its club upwards” (La Flor). The coffins are
empty in Bacurau – bought in advance for deaths that have been planned, but not yet executed.
 But the film takes a clue from Django: the place of grief is also the place of action, of confronting
the future with the experience of surviving a traumatic past. The bloodshed seems inevitable, but
 we don’t know whose blood will soak this land just yet.

The film creates an elaborate web that isolates the town, and the residents are enlisted to play a
game they can’t escape, and that has a different rulebook made just for them. Meanwhile,
Sudestinos (an underheard expression that names the people from the Brazilian Southeast –
those who are very used to profiling the citizens of the Brazilian Northeast, like those who live in
Bacurau, Nordestinos) cooperate with local politicians to accommodate the strange pastime of a
group of foreign tourists who have come to town for a hunting competition that will make the
town and its people vanish from the face of the Earth. Like the rabbit in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of
the Game (1939), sacrificed for the pleasure of the bourgeoisie (the hunt as well as the movie
itself), these characters have no way out; except, maybe, up or down.
 I

The stars over Bacurau say more than one can immediately read. When the echoey, fluttering
synthesizers that open “Não Identificado” take the soundtrack, running with the opening credits,
it is inevitable to remember that the two other fiction feature films directed by Kleber Mendonça
Filho started from a similar pattern.

In Neighboring Sounds (O Som ao Redor, 2013) archival black and white photographs documenting
the structures of the oligarchy in Recife – a centuries-old authority maintained through
 exploitation and physical terror – is animated by the building, layered percussion in Michel
Colombier’s and Serge Gainsbourg’s “Cadavers en serie” (1968). The beat segues into a long take
 of two kids – a girl in rollerblades and a boy in a bike – roaming around the confines of their
building’s parking garage until they reach the playground where other children and their nannies
occupy stratified parts of the daily mise-en-scène.

In Aquarius (2016), Taiguara’s “Hoje” (1977) plays over archival black and white photographs of an
idealized beachside past that slowly becomes more vertical, leading to a zoom-in into 1980,
where cars roam on the beach sand and blast the latest Queen. The linear metric of “Another One
Bites the Dust” contrasts with the spiraling movements of the car in the previous shot, echoing a
classic moment in Ruy Guerra’s Cinema Novo landmark The Unscrupulous Ones (Os Cafajestes,
1962), self-reflexively turning a page in Brazilian culture.
 I


I

Aquarius (2016), Kleber Mendonça Filho

In all three films, the combination of music and indexes of temporal exchanges (different facets
of an archival past in Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius; the surveillance of a CGI near-future in
Bacurau) leads to displaced moving vehicles (the rollerblades and bike in the garage; the cars in
the sand; the satellite and the water truck running over coffins) making the movies start in media
res, capturing processes that are already in motion.

But a linear reading of the openings also establishes a peculiar historical timeline connecting all
three films: in Neighboring Sounds, the maintenance of the oligarchy in Recife, 2013; in Aquarius,
the dispute between different types of urban elites in 2016; and in Bacurau, the predatory destiny
(“in a near future,” a title card says) that is being designed for all those social characters in the
margins of the previous two films, unbeknownst to them. This narrative thread that ties the three
films is an indication that the readymade connection between Bacurau and life-under-Bolsonaro
might be fortuitous, but certainly not accidental. Kleber Mendonça Filho is a director of causal
relationships – a peculiarity that makes him seem strangely American in the context of Brazilian
cinema. But his sense of causality is more fitting to identify how social structures connect and
develop than to show how the personal journey of an individual does – making him very Brazilian
when compared to the dominant narratives of American cinema. This movement from the
 personal to the social finds a lot of visual and aural expressions in this latest film – from the use
of split diopters that squeeze together two focal planes to the recurring shots that go from an
extreme close-up to a wide shot, with the radical use of a crane.

But, while all three films have specific textures and colors – differences that are more
pronounced in the shared direction of the latest feature, starting with the aforementioned CGI
overture that both fits the pre-established auteurial pattern and bursts its seams from within –
they all end up under the spell of the same genre: Brazilian history is best represented as a siege.

In the case of Bacurau, the siege is not really a British, but a Western invasion: iê, iê, iê. However,
when looking at the siege format, the film privileges this peculiar intersection where exchanges
take place even when they are extremely asymmetrical. One side might take more than they
leave, but they can never control what will be made of what was left. “A Brazilian Western,” “John
Carpenter in the Tropics,” or “a colonial nightmare” are all valid hypothetical attempts when
trying to deal with the violence, both explicit and implicit, that barely holds the movie together.
While this plot line alone could lead to a fairly stereotypical mode of anti-colonial critique, the
film faces this invasion reflectively, inspired by the way Domingas tests the water of the
impending future, offering Michael (Udo Kier) a homemade meal. Bacurau is, itself, invaded by a
Western, twisted from the inside by an ambiguous fascination with a genre that is so foreign to
that landscape, and at the same time so fitting to tell the story of permanent internal
 colonization that targets the Brazilian Northeast. What changes is basically the vantage point:
the stars are all there, but the constellations are inverted. The genre is there but, in Brazil, even
 the title of Steven Spielberg’s Duel has been translated as Trapped (Encurralado).

Finding constellations in the sky does not come naturally. In order to see the shapes that
culturally identify them, one needs the power of imagination to connect the dots – like Dreyfuss
in his argentinean adventure, or a film director who must have a certain kind of sensibility or
training to decode the inner workings of a genre. It takes looking at a flying saucer and not only
seeing it as a flying saucer, but also identifying it as a drone – a surveillance apparatus that
doesn’t always blend with the landscape. That’s the beauty and the danger of it: a love song to
record a flying saucer, with tape delays, synthesizers, and sounds from a future past… a Western
 in that part of the West which is more often referred to as the Global South. Brazilian
Anthropophagy: cultural cannibalism as a mode of survival.

Coming out of the video store generation, Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho master
the formal requirements of the multiple genres that make the film – the arrival as inciting
incident; the ticking clock as a tool of suspense; the elongated set-ups and the body-splitting
payoff; the narrative choir played by the town’s busker (the repentista – a sarcastic storyteller
typical of the Brazilian Northeast who is as close to Charles Bronson’s ominous Harmonica, in
Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, as he is to the Greek aoido, or to Jards Macalé’s blind
singer in Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Amuleto de Ogum – iê, iê, iê). These patterns work in familiar,
unidentified territory, demanding a gut reaction through the carefully rough orchestration of
images and sounds. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, they all lead to what is most specific, to the
coffin that belongs only to Bacurau: the museum.

A museum is a place that fossilizes and embalms the past in order to make it available for the
present and the future. Bacurau is far from an idyll – there is prostitution, hangovers, some
degree of poverty, and a programmatic draught that keeps the population hanging by a thread –
but, like the man who asks to take a nap in the hospital bed, we have to work with what we have.
What we have, in this case, is a list of names – some that sound familiar, others that don’t, but
that perhaps should, hidden in opacity like the lyrics of the songs – names that people chant
 together when they are counting their dead.

 This memorable sequence in the film might trigger some more immediate associations which
are no less important – Marisa Letícia (the deceased wife of president Lula da Silva); and Marielle
(the first name of Marielle Franco, a politician and activist executed over a year ago by the militia
in Rio de Janeiro, whose assassination is yet to be completely solved). But perhaps a richer
dramatic clue can be found in the name that was saved for last: João Pedro Teixeira.

Teixeira was a real-life peasant leader who was executed by mercenaries on a stretch of road
between Sapé and Café do Vento (Paraíba – a state that border’s Kleber and Juliano’s
Pernambuco) in 1962. In 1964, the filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho was shooting a fictionalized
version of his life whose cast included his wife, Elizabeth Teixeira, playing herself. The shoot was
interrupted halfway by the military coup. Troops raided the film set looking for what the official
press had advertised as subversive material. The fictional account would remain incomplete, but
Coutinho turned that interrupted attempt into a monumental feature-length documentary called
Twenty Years Later (Cabra Marcado para Morrer, 1984) – an amalgam of personal experience, historical
narrative, and self-reflexive meditation that marks the end of the Cinema Novo project, as well as
the beginning of a different phase in Brazilian cinema.
 I

Elizabeth Teixeira in Twenty Years Later (1984), Eduardo

Coutinho

The mention of João Pedro Teixeira’s name in the list of victimized heroes is more than a filmic
reference: it points at an “alternative” history of Brazil whose most significant episodes have
taken place in the Northeast. This history is not founded on Sergio Buarque de Holanda’s myth of
 cordiality, but on successive episodes of oppression and struggle that this very myth works to
erase (in the past couple of years, it’s become quite obvious that the cost of not turning into
 museums the apparatus of death used by the military dictatorship between 1964 and 1984 has
been too high, opening the possibility of programmatic distortion by apologists and deniers). It’s
a lesson shared with Glauber Rocha and Frantz Fanon: the Bacurau museum preserves this
iconography of struggle – Canudos, Malês, Palmares, the Cariris Confederation – for future
reference. This is also our past, and it won’t be erased or forgotten by those who keep being
forced to bury their living. So they remember it, keeping the blood prints, and hanging the guns
on the wall, so that the passing of time and the violence of the sun can slowly trace their outline.

The siege is our daily bread, whether we’re inside the tightening circle, or are part of the circle
itself. In a conversation with the filmmaker Ramon Porto Mota – who is from Paraíba, and not
from the Southeast, like I am – he pointed out an aspect concerning the film’s title: bacurau is an
angry nightbird that exists all over Brazil (in fact, between the south of Mexico and Argentina),
but that is only called bacurau in the Northeast. This tension between the local and the external,
the colloquial and the scientific, between meaning and matter, shoots back to the opening stars,
the untranslated song, and the oblivious satellite: the fact that this place (of violence) and all it
stands for (as possibility) has not been recognized does not mean it is not there.
 If you were to search for Bacurau on your map now, would it be there?

One needs to make their own maps, but they don’t need to make them alone. When the people of
the town must get a hold of Lunga (Silvero Pereira), their protector in hiding, they use a mirror to
reflect the sun, making a language out of light – the Northeastern light, as imprinted in Linduarte
Noronha’s Aruanda (1960), Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Barren Lives (Vidas Secas, 1963), Glauber
Rocha’s Black God White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, 1964), Coutinho’s Twenty Years Later, and
 Marcelo Gomes’ Cinema, Aspirins, and Vultures (Cinema, Aspirinas e Urubus, 2005), among so many
others. As all the technological devices fail to track the history written not only on the ground but
 also underneath it, what the film’s third act reserves is not merely a cathartic bloodshed. That
was long in the making. Instead, Bacurau makes a much more suggestive statement: those who
are constantly invisibilized get better at being invisible. We learn how to hear the “yeah, yeah,
yeah,” but we also learn how to turn it into a iê, iê, iê, a sentimental anticomputer to be released as
a love song to the near-future, after the feast and the carnage of Carnival.

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3 COMMENTS · BLOG, BRAZILIAN CINEMA, CINEMA

COMMENTS

Rodrigo Torres says

OCTOBER 16, 2019 AT 6:38 AM
 Wow!

Reply

ivone margulies says

MARCH 14, 2020 AT 5:01 PM

fabio que impressionate sua leitura do filme. The reading is deep and transversal crossing Both
te coutrys history and cinema’s. Wow indeed.

Reply


Fabio Andrade says
 MARCH 16, 2020 AT 1:02 PM

muito obrigado, ivone, seu comentário fez meu mês aqui!

Reply

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