The Observer - 25.08.2019

34

Critics

A RELEASE

Film

The Observer Critics

25.08.19

Film of the decade?

Streaming

Guy

Lodge

A Brazilian road movie

that’s been wowing critics

for two years fi nally makes

its UK debut – on Mubi

the diminutive itinerant labourer

whose path he crosses. Sent on

an errand to Cristiano’s quarters,

Andre stumbles across his tatty,

handwritten memoirs – and the fi lm

in turn shifts into the notebook’s

more mythic, freewheeling narrative,

documenting the seemingly

unremarkable worker’s travels and

travails over the course of a decade.

It’s a cross-country, blue-collar

odyssey taking in criminal

and romantic escapades,

stopping off in prisons,

brothels and assorted

dusty towns – building

into a patchwork

of struggling, ever-

changing Brazilian

society, alive with pointed

working-class politics.

Cristiano is a drifter, but not

driven by wanderlust: it’s hard-

scrabble economic reality that blows

him from place to place. Scored to

a gorgeous, handpicked playlist

of folk and country cuts that lend

unsentimental grace to our hero’s

ramblings, Araby has the heft and

expanse of epic fi lm-making, yet

feels as intimate and fragile as a

stranger’s barroom anecdote.

While you’re in a wistful arthouse

I was late getting to this week’s
selected fi lm – though not as late
as fi lm distributors in the UK: it has
never been picked up for a cinema
or even a DVD release. For more
than two years, respected colleagues
have been talking up the merits
of Araby , a tiny but mighty fi ction
debut by Brazilian fi lm-makers João
Dumans and Affonso Uchoa. The
Hollywood Reporter critic Neil Young
has gone so far as to declare it the
best fi lm of this fast-closing decade.
Having missed it on its year-long
festival run in 2017, I waited for a
chance to see it on a big screen.

New to streaming

& DVD this week

That chance hasn’t come, but

Mubi has, as it so often does, stepped

into the breach. Araby is available

to stream on their curated menu

until mid-September; you’d do well

to take the chance while it’s there.

The fi lm is, as promised, something

very special: a careworn, will-o’-the-

wisp road movie, contained within

a memory that may or may not

be imagined. Dumans and Uchoa

have a documentary background

that’s evident in their calm, clear-

eyed portrait of a hard-knock life

in permanent fl ux. Yet there’s a

glimmering magic to it too. It’s a fi lm

preoccupied with the way we fashion

our lives into storytelling.

You have to approach it with some

patience. The fi rst 20 minutes or

so promise a more austere exercise

in grainy realism than the poetic

picaresque we eventually get.

We’re introduced to Andre ( Murilo

Caliari , right ), a shy, bored teenager

abandoned by his parents in a

dead-end Brazilian factory town,

and Cristiano ( Aristides de Sousa ),

reverie, you have a week left to catch

some highlights from the recent

Locarno fi lm festival, which wrapped

last week. A few selections from this

year’s programme are streaming for

free on FestivalScope until the end

of August. You only need an hour,

for example, to fi t in a viewing of

the lovely Swiss semi-documentary

Bird Island , a subtly dreamy study

of an avian sanctuary in Geneva

that offers as much healing

to the wounded people

who enter it as it does

their feathered friends.

Wilcox , meanwhile, is a

moving character study

of an isolated survivalist,

stripped of dialogue and

affectation, that marks

a bracing change of pace

for the usually more mannered

Quebecois auteur Denis Côté. Finally,

The Prince’s Voyage , the latest

fi nely drawn feature from veteran

French animator Jean-François

Laguionie, is a thing of melancholic,

watercoloured beauty. Chronicling

a lost monkey-prince’s journey to

self-realisation, it’s part fairytale,

part philosophical allegory, and

rather more like Araby than you

might think.

Greta

(Universal, 15)

If a cold-eyed, Chanel-clad Isabelle

Huppert terrorising Chloë Grace

Moretz sounds like a good time

to you, Neil Jordan’s deliciously

ludicrous stalker thriller will fulfi l all

its high-camp promise.

In Fabric

(Curzon Artifi cial Eye, 18)

Peter Strickland’s 70s-accented

art-horror farce about a

haunted dress feels a bit ragged

structurally – where’s the third

part? – but it’s a vision as ravishing

as it is eccentric.

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

(Eureka, 18)

A sharp Blu-ray restoration of

Fred Schepisi’s still-ferocious

Australian cinema landmark from

1978, following an indigenous

farmhand’s violent revenge mission

against his oppressors in the

early 20th century.