carnaval

Movies about food are quite popular. Movies about food that are not exactly tasteful and with a Fellini ?flavor? are very unusual. Estômago is a black comedy with references from the Italian cinema, specially from Fellini (the soundtrack sounds like Nights of Cabiria´s), but with strong and hot colors to give a Brazilian taste. Food as a metaphor for sensuality. Food as a way to get power. The rise and downfall of a simple man that discover his talent in cooking. Highly recommended.

The whole film takes place during only one night in a typical Brazilian dance hall called Chega de Saudade, an old-fashioned place where people, usually older and lonely, go to dance, flirt and refound lost memories and times.

It´s the second film by Laís Bodanzky that also directed the excellent Bicho de Sete Cabeças aka Brainstorm.

With a cast of great names of the Brazilian tv/theater, Chega de Saudade is a nice movie with good humour. Very funny specially to those that have already gone to a place like that.

Maybe to those who didn´t read Chico Buarque´s novel, the movie can be interesting; otherwise, it´s hard to get into it. The movie is not bad and I know how hard it is to adapt a novel into a script, but the movie "simplifies" and ends up losing the great about the book. Most of the nude and sex scenes are desnecessary, even if mentioned in the book, and the long period and hard effort of the character to learn the Hungarian language is not perceptible. Also, a few (and sometimes long) shots about irrelevant parts/points.

Review soon.
For now, all I can say it is an interesting and beautiful Brazilian movie, very far from all the Brazilian stereotypes.

Predictable characters and plot. Laís Bodanzky trying to make commercial cinema, when she has already showed (and proved) that can make much much better.

I had not the slight desire to watch it, but it's actually very good, better than Tropa de Elite/The Elite Squad. Many countries have to face "similar" problems, but the extension of violence and corruption in Brazil is just revolting.

Waste Land is a documentary about the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz and his "social work" with workers from the garbage dump Jardim Gramacho. All that poverty is heartbreaking and outrageous in a country with absurd social differences where a few people have a monthly wage that could save lot of families. At the end of the film I could only think how unfair the situation is - Muniz had an amazing and beautiful gesture, but the real changes in the community and their lives were minimal - and felt like that Boris's quote*:

"But what do you do? You read about some massacre in Darfur or some school bus gets blown up, and you go "Oh my God, the horror," and then you turn the page and finish your eggs from the free range chickens. Because what can you do? It's overwhelming!".

Because, what can we do? As the Brazilian filmmaker João Moreira Salles says, it would be an illusion to think that a documentary can change the world and its characters. Vik Muniz did his part and it must be enough.

Other films had already explored this theme like Ilha das Flores (Isle of Flowers, by Jorge Furtado) and Estamira (directed by Macros Prado), both stronger than Waste Land**. This documentary is important to both social and artistic worlds, but it's quite normal as a film. The soundtrack, composed by Mody, sounds superficial and too much melodramatic sometimes. The same happens to some scenes like the one where Vik Muniz, alone in his place, looks to the world globe in his hands with a desolate expression. It's one of those poor scenes where we can almost listen the director saying: take the globe in your hands, look at it, make a sad face, you miss those people, yes, like that, good, that's it . Cut.



* Whatever Works, by Woody Allen.
**There's also the documentary Boca de Lixo, directed by Edurado Coutinho, that I haven't seen yet.

There's no such thing as reality. All that we see and experience end up being part of a frame. Something like "everything has three sides": your, mine and the (supposed) true one. Where stands the reality of the 'you' that has nothing to do with the 'me'?

While watching Santiago, I could truly understand what Susan Sontag meant when she compared the camera to a gun. In her novel "On Photograph", she says that : "To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as a camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a subliminal murder - a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time."
We all know that documentaries are only a part of a whole, a fraction of something called reality. What we don't tend to think about is that real characters are also a creation, a fiction when converted into a subject.

Santiago was the enigmatic butler of the filmmaker's family. Speaking more than five languages, a lover of classical music and boxing, the Argentinian wrote all along his life 30,000 pages about the history of the world's aristocracy. These are facts, however, what Salles was really looking for when decided to make the documentary - what he only discovered thirteen years later - was not the real Santiago, but Santiago from his childhood memories. Like an implacable murder, Salles "violates" Santiago and turns him into an object to finds out, at the end, that the relationship employer and employee had never been broken, as this relationship is also an allegory of what happens throughout any film between the documentarist and his/her subject. Or between reality and fiction.



* the black and white film was the perfect choice. a tropical light wouldn't match with Santiago's personality and sense of respect (for tradition).

Love Stories Only Last 90 Minutes. Or Machado de Assis meets Rubem Fonseca.

Zeca is a literary cliché: a young man who works for years on his novel, "an ambitious project, kind of gothic, thriller-like" stuck on page 50. Living in an old "European look" apartment in Lapa, the famous bohemian neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro, he is married to a woman who seems to have "come out of a French movie: beautiful, intelligent, independent and cold, thoroughly cold". At least that's how he sees her.

Like it happens in Machado's novel Dom Casmurro (Sir Dour), all we know about the other characters is what the protagonist tells/shows us. Like Bentinho suspected of Capitu, Zeca is almost sure that his wife, Julia, is cheating on him with her friend, Carol. Trying to get to know his rival, "in a rational process to understand that which is unacceptable in principle: being dumped for someone else", he ends up falling in love with Carol and the love triangle is settled.

Some jokes may not make sense to a foreign viewer like the line about Bravo magazine ("I'm chick and cultured") and Paulo Coelho ("Am I the sort of man to quote Paulo Coelho?"), which scene is, by the way, really funny. For Brazilians. If you don't know at least a little bit about Rubem Fonseca and haven't read on Bravo that "90% of today's Brazilian writers sucked off his ideas", some characteristics of Zeca and some situations may pass unnoticed. He decided to drink till he forgot his own name and when he was almost there, someone decided to remind him: Rubem Fonseca! A copy of the best one.

"I burst into the building out to get Julia's confession by force. The hassle is I live on the last floor. So, I was bloodthirsty on the first steps, but by the second, I wanted to have a tough but civilized conversation. By the third, I'd decided to wait for her to tell me the truth. When I knocked on the door, I'd already resigned myself to being a tame cuckold".

The film has a great, but mostly male chauvinist sense of humor, that couldn't, of course, to leave aside the typical and unnecessary nudity and sex scenes. Unnecessary even to a selfish and immature "wannabe Rubem Fonseca"? Yeah, taking it from this point of view, I think they were not that gratuitous.

"Based on the book " O Brasil dos gringos", by Tunico Amâncio, the documentary shows the vision that world cinema has of the country, through the films in which Brazil was a location, a theme or even a reference, and what is behind these productions, through interviews with their directors and screenwriters. The objective is to reveal the mechanisms that produce that image. The stories, motivations and/or pressures that are behind these films".

Lucia Murat's idea was very interesting, however a deeply serious study would be more effective. The laid back tone and her preconceived point of view, directing the interviewees (specially the "common" people) to previously selected clichés, end up equaling the documentary to the theme itself. Like Leonardo Mecchi says in his review (revistacinetica.com.br), "Murat commits the same mistake she accuses his interviewees to do: denies them the individualization and shows this look as intrinsically and necessarily prejudiced". He also points out how she let such an important film like Black Orpheus (directed by Mrcel Camus) out, "while films like Lambada, The Forbidden Dance and Anaconda are analyzed as if they were in-depth studies on the Brazilianness and not the unpretentious and 'self-consciously built on clichés' films they are." Even inside this unpretentious selection, others films stayed out like "Woman on Top", directed by the Venezuelan film director Fina Torres. With Penelope Cruz, "Woman on Top" is a light romantic comedy produced in USA, but without obvious clichés. In the end of Godard's Bande à Part, Odile asks Franz if there're lions in Brazil to which he answers: as well as croc...Odiles".

If seeking the truth, documentaries and documentarists should have an impartial point of view. Choosing only one side, a possible reality is lost. Right in the beginning of the film, Murat says that the culture industry shares the responsibility of these clichés that we're always trying to get away from. Tired of being force-fed these ideas, she decided to find those who created this character called Brazil. This is as so surreal as irresponsible. Who created this character called Brazil? Brazil did it. Where comes the idea of sex, vulgarity and freedom from? From Brazilian films, specially the Pornochanchada ones, and from the Carnaval. That image of Brazil as the country of football and beautiful women, among other things, was created by its own people, bought worldwide and is still fed nowadays because it sells. If we really are a country without identity - "After all, who are we? (dedicated) To all who look for their identity" - then we only exist through the regard of the other, through stereotypes.

As entertainment, even if following the typical format, it is quite nice and funny. In the other hand, being a film for kids or not, it´s impossible to close the eyes and pretend that the same "fantasies and clichés about Brazil and Brazilians" are not being reinforced here and, worst, by a Brazilian director. Going against Lúcia Murat´s argument that clichés about Brazil are created by international films, Carlos Saldanha, like Lúcia Murati herself, prove once again that fantasies about Brazil are born nowhere other than on Tupiniquim soil or, maybe it´s better to say, on Macaw lands.