064 REVIEW
p until very recently, on the rare occasion
a Brazilian film became popular outside
of the country, it seemed to cater to a
specific type of first-world fantasy – often one of
Brazil as a hypersexualised free-for-all land where
people gun each other down mercilessly. A type of
dehumanising content most foreign viewers could
happily distance themselves from. With Kléber
Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau,
that is no longer the case.
Set in a semi-distant future, in a small city in
the middle of the Northeast called Bacurau, the
film begins with the death of Dona Carmelita, a
spiritual matriarch. As the city grieves, a nefarious
plan is slowly coming to fruition – it starts with
the city suddenly disappearing off Google Maps.
Then the already scarce water supply is sabotaged,
followed by complete internet outage. The culprits,
we discover, are Americans, looking to fulfil a
man-hunt fantasy, enabled by the town’s corrupt
mayor and two Brazilians from Southern cities.
However, things do not go according to plan. Cue
the bloodshed.
Much of Bacurau’s narrative might appear to
follow that of a standard revenge fantasy flick. But,
to reduce the film a simple expression of horrific
violence to this would be a to underestimate its
complexity. The film is, with all its tropes and
triumphs, an intricate portrait of Brazilian society
and all the contradictions that exist within it.
Explicit and bloody retributive justice from a
community that has been wronged by just about
every authority there is appears to drive the plot,but thrumming just below the surface is a central
theme: arrogance. It is arrogance that made the
pair of Brazilians from São Paulo and Rio consider
themselves, in their own perceived “European-
ness”, better than the inhabitants of a tiny town in
the rural Northwest. It is arrogance that brought
the English-speaking hunters to Bacurau, that
made them believe that advanced technology
entitled them to murder, and that stopped them
from going into the city’s small museum (despite
many an invitation by the citizens) and seeing the
battling heritage and arsenal kept within its walls.
So much of Bacurau combines a sense of
surrealism with icons familiar to most Brazilians- the old man teasingly composing a song as
he wanders along, the glaring inequality, the
sense of community that comes from collective
survival. Our culture is many cultures at once,
and Mendonça Filho and Dornelles succeed in
capturing several of them, between fake UFOs,
poetry and hallucinogenic drugs.
This sense of “familiarity” is perfectly
embodied in Silvero Pereira’s character Lunga
who, in all his androgyny and bloodlust, is a direct
reference to the Northeastern cangaceiros – 19th
century bandits (or heroes, depending on who
you ask), who were decapitated by the police and
whose heads were left to publicly decompose at the
stairs of the prefecture for days. The photos of the
cangaceiros’ dead bodies were printed in the papers
with much pride back in 1938. In 2020-something,
Lunga is now the one wielding a machete.
BIJU BELINKY
U
Bacurau
Directed by
JULIANO DORNELLES
KLEBER MENDONÇA FILHO
Starring
SÔNIA BRAGA
UDO KIER
BÁRBARA COLEN
Released
13 MARCH
ANTICIPATION.
A film that has galvanised the
public in Brazil. Need to see this.
ENJOYMENT.
Revolutionary and vital.
IN RETROSPECT.
A film that is deeply embedded
within, and knowledgable
of, Brazil’s trecherous
modern history.