FILMS OF THE MONTH
58 | Sight&Sound | April 2020Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
Around the middle of Kleber Mendonça Filho
and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau, set in the
harsh sertão backcountry of the Brazilian state
of Pernambuco, there is a scene that might be
familiar from any number of American westerns.
Alerted to the fact of something amiss when a
herd of horses from a neighbouring farm comes
galloping through the village of the film’s title- a lyric interlude, in a movie that abounds in
them – two locals ride out to investigate, and
arrive to find the entire household butchered.
In the western of Hollywood’s Golden Age,
this would be a sign of an impending threat
to the fragile outpost of civilisation amid the
wilderness – bandits, perhaps, or more likely a
belligerent Native American tribe on the warpath.
Here too it signifies an impending threat, but
one that comes from the descendants of those
western settlers – Americans abroad with no
civilisation to bestow, only bloodlust to slake.
Filho and co-director Dornelles, a filmmaker in
his own right and production designer on Filho’s
Neighbouring Sounds (2012) and Aquarius (2016),
aren’t the first Brazilians to rebuild the western
with local materials – most famously, one can
cite the example of Antonio das Mortes (1969) by
Glauber Rocha, who once described the western
as “the blood which runs through the veins of the
American man”. For its first half, Bacurau proceeds
as a sort of portrait of a frontier community,
as detailed with incident and almost as rich in
atmosphere as the little Oregon town in Jacques
Tourneur’s Canyon Passage (1946), complete
with a local balladeer à la Hoagy Carmichael.
In the outpost of Bacurau, however, no attempt
is being made to reproduce the civilisation of
the rest of Brazil. The fictional community, with
its largely black and indigenous population, has
been imagined as a quilombo, one of the culturally
distinct settlements of runaway slaves that dot
the Brazilian hinterlands, as depicted in Linduarte
Noronha’s proto-Cinema Novo film Aruanda
(1960). Powerful hallucinogens are here a part
of the locals’ balanced diet, and sex workers mix
without stigma with the rest of the community.
From what we can gather, the village is run
along communal lines – when expired foodstuffs
are donated by an unscrupulous local politician,
they are divvied up with no instruction other than
for everyone to take as needed. I say “from what
we can gather”, because Filho and Dornelles’s
approach is to give us only as much information
as we require – there is no explanation for the
dispute over water rights that seems to have put
the village at odds with the government, nor
what drove a small coterie of young men, led by
Silvero Pereira’s Lunga, to live in isolation from the
community, only to be drawn back by catastrophe.
Tactical withholding is also key to the film’s
narrative strategy, proceeding as it does through
a kind of baton-passing of the POV. After staying
among the residents of Bacurau and nervously
observing, with them, the auguries of something
sinister afoot – the first indication is a scattering of
coffins spilled across a road by an overturned truck- the film gloms on to two suspicious vacationers
from the urban south and follows them to their
employers, those awful Americans. The leader of
the Yanks is a suave German-American, played
by Udo Kier, and it is hard to say if he and his
group are soldiers of fortune or soldiers of leisure,
down in the sertão to play Make Your Own My
Lai with the permission of local government, out
on an ultraviolent glamping trip replete with
vintage firearms. (One of the girls goes out to
battle carrying a Thompson submachine gun, a
favourite of the Prohibition era.) Here, the blood
that runs through the veins of the American
man – and woman – has gone very, very bad.
The anachronistic arsenals on display only
increase Bacurau’s out-of-time feel, which comes
quite literally to a head when a line of trophy
severed noggins – an image that might seem
to belong to a distant past of tribal warfare – is
photographed by observers with smartphones
and tablets. The film’s setting is given as “a
few years from now”, but the science-fiction
flourishes are few, excepting an automatic
translation device that makes an appearance at
a key moment and the drones the Americans
use, shaped like 1950s-style flying saucers. An
opening shot looking down on Earth from above,
crossed by a passing satellite before descending
to the remote setting of Bacurau, establishes
the film’s future as today’s surveillance society;
the ubiquity of camera-eyes provides some
nice bits of business, including an impromptu
field fuck between two of the charged-up US
shooters after a kill, as observed by a passing
drone, which in its combination of libido
and militaristic sadism inspires memories
of Lynndie England and Charles Graner.
While Bacurau begins and ends with the image
of Bárbara Colen’s villager Teresa, it gives us no
single protagonist – no lone rider ambling into
town, as in the American western – but rather
two very different communities. The village
has just lost its leading citizen, leaving in her
place the doctor, played by Sônia Braga, who
presides over the handing out of foodstuffs. Of
the Americans, Kier gives the only compelling
characterisation of the lot, clammy and cruel. The
others are varying degrees of parochial, arrogant,
racist, bloodthirsty and boorish – which, sure, fair
enough – but, more problematically, not capable
as a body of actors of investing the intended black
comedy of, say, a scene in which they descend
into semantic bickering about when it is or is
not ethically acceptable to kill a child. Whether
they are operating as hired hands or paying for
the pleasure remains ambiguous – they seem
neither competent enough to be professionals
nor wealthy enough to afford bloodsport,
though perhaps it is part of the film’s premise
that in the future even a man who works in HR
can afford to play The Most Dangerous Game.
Such murkiness does not extend to Filho and
Dornelles’s style, marked as it is by a hard, matter-
of-fact clarity – a horizontally rolling widescreen,
occasionally crossed by Kurosawa-reminiscent
wipes. (A former film critic, Filho makes no secret
of his debts: Bacurau’s school is named for one
“Prof João Carpinteira”.) Given to the occasional
pulsing zoom or showy split diopter shot, their
approach is not so unadorned as, say, that of
S. Craig Zahler in Dragged Across Concrete (2018),
but Filho and Dornelles are looking to some of
the same tough, unsentimental masters – and
to call Zahler’s film simply a work of the ‘right’
and Filho and Dornelles’s one of the ‘left’ would
be to melt them down to an unrecognisable
form. Altering the context of their sources, Filho
and Dornelles demonstrate the remarkable
power that remains in well-worn genre tropes
when employed with force and intelligence.The impending threat here
comes from the descendants of
the western settlers – Americans
abroad with no civilisation to
bestow, only bloodlust to slake
Brazil/France 2019
Directors: Kleber Mendonça Filho,
Juliano Dornelles
Certificate 18 131m 14sWhat was the impetus for ‘Bacurau’?
Juliano Dornelles (below, right): Bacurau
grew out of our observations, annoyance and
desire to surprise people by showing this poor,
remote part of the world getting revenge on
people who consider [its residents] “simple,”
“funny” or “fragile”, when they are just as
complex and interesting as everybody else. It is
essential that the point of view is northeastern,
and that it is ours. The cinema still owes a lot
of space to the Brazilian northeast, and
even more so in the way I believe we
did in Bacurau, where everyone is
poor but nobody is to be pitied.
How did current events in
Brazil impact the script?
JD: We were dealing with
a sort of race against
reality throughout the
writing of the script. The
news we read daily was
(and still is) so absurd and
dystopian that Bacurau was
gaining more and more plausibility.Kleber Mendonça Filho (below, left): The
writing had been ongoing for years when
political events took place that reflected
things we had written. There are a number
of ideas which we tried to develop from
our own observations on Brazil and the
world, trying to make it very local.
Can you give some examples of
how you balanced the local with the
global in the film’s aesthetic?
KMF: I would emphasise the use of
1970s American Panavision C Series
anamorphic prime lenses. The
optical distortions of these
lenses bring to mind a strain
of American cinema that
is very familiar but also
quite foreign. It was also
a real pleasure to be able
to buy the rights to such
a powerful piece of music
as ‘Night’ by John Carpenter,
one of the directors who most
made me want to make movies.Q&A Kleber Mendonça Filho
and Juliano Dornelles, co-directors
Bacurau