What Brazil Has to Offer:

Head over to PopMatters and read my review for Best of Global Lens: Brazil.

While Watching "Black Orpheus"...

...I was stunned at how Marcel Camus managed to make such an outstanding film with such basic concepts. I also am thinking that Brazilian music might be the music that has inspired the best films ever made (Talk to Her anyone?).


I loved how Camus was able to work his way around the Greek myth of Orpheus and did it in a way that was not only ingenious but practically natural.
See how he gets the actors dressed up in Greek-like costumes and simply uses the excuse of carnival to make them fit in.
The rest of his allegories work perfectly because there's a strange balance between what we can think of as the real world and the mythological world. It's as if on carnival, a portal to another dimension had opened and made it logical for various symbolic creatures and human beings to walk the streets together.


The film has an ongoing theme of windows that's simply remarkable. It might have something to do with the various layers the film contains and how we're seeing it through cultural, musical, racial etc. windows.


The idea of death in this film is terrifying and mystifying. Camus taps on a very primal state and makes us fascinated by death in the way Bergman and Allen have.


If this isn't the most amazing metaphor for Orpheus' descent towards hell then I don't know what is.
If you haven't seen this film, wait until you see who Cerberus is. Truly brilliant.

Love is All We Need *1/2

Director: Jorge Durán
Cast: Cauã Reymond, Ângelo Antônio, Fabiula Nascimento
Simone Spoladore, Victor Navega Motta

Love is All We Need (Não se pode viver sem amor) is the third film by Chilean writer/director Jorge Durán. Set in Rio de Janeiro during Christmas Eve, it follows multiple characters as they reach collective epiphanies revolving around love of course.
Young Gabriel (Motta) and Roseli (Spoladore) arrive to the city looking for the boy's father, unemployed lawyer Joao (Reymond) decides to try the criminal way in order to get enough money to elope with his girlfriend Gilda (Nascimento), while university professor Pedro (Antônio) wonders where his future will take him.
To say that the film's opening credits (a Saul Bass-y stars and jazz stunner of an opener) are much more interesting than anything that comes later, might be a disservice to anyone who worked in the film but becomes quite accurate when the movie reaches its climax.
Durán focuses on forcing the connections instead of letting them grow organically and all the characters seem to know they're predestined to know each other and learn something valuable.
It doesn't help that each of their stories isn't never that interesting to begin with and we might create assumptions of our own to make the whole thing matter more.
Therefore as Gabriel travels around the city looking for his dad we begin to assume he might be connected to Gilda-the stripper with a secret-in the end of course they are, but not in conventional ways.
The characters' motivations are never clear and the actors end up giving extreme performances that hurt the film's theme of unity (Reymond and Antônio are all about restraint, Nascimento is extreme theatrical and Motta intends well but suffers because of the ridiculous twists his character endures).
Durán chooses to end his film with a moment that should recall magical realism but comes off as a tacky deus ex machina complete with the ugliest looking visual effects ever.
If the director was trying to unite the rawness of digital film (in honestly most of the film has the texture and look of a soap opera) with the richness of Brazil's culture, the result is often more confusing, dull and shallow than magical.

Garapa ***

Director: José Padilha

Garapa is a film about contrasts; it focuses its attention on the lives of three Brazilian families whose major ailment is extreme hunger.
When they can't afford milk, one of the families relies on garapa (a drink made out of water and sugar cane) to satiate its hunger. While a mother from another family has to hide milk so her alcoholic husband won't sell it to buy cachaca (ironically nothing more than fermented garapa).
This might be a too obvious example of contrast but director Padilha makes sure that his movie becomes more of a clash of ideas and emotions than a mere "let's save the world" documentary.
The film might have United Nations bookends but it's center is pure out-of-the-box filmmaking that dares us to see how much we can take.
Most of the scenes are made out of moments where filth, human misery and despair might provoke actual physical discomfort in audience members who, with reason, would run away from a similar scene in real life.
Padilha asks us then why is it easier for us to confront moments of pain like this on a movie screen than out in the streets. It's especially interesting to see the dichotomy he creates between our ability to remain seated while we watch people suffer and the relation this has to the fact that it's being filtered through film (just how much have our notions of non fiction have to do with a certain disbelief on what we see onscreen is a different matter altogether).
He cleverly shoots the film in high contrast black and white, which tricks our mind into thinking we might be watching a neorrealist film in the tradition of Luchino Visconti's La Terra Trema.
The milky texture of the whites is unsettling enough to make us aware that the intensity of the light sometimes helps conceal darker truths.
During some scenes the image turns almost completely dark except for little creases inside the shacks that allow glimmers of light to show us reality in subtle strokes.
It's mostly this contrast between the strange, almost primitive, beauty of the images onscreen and the raw tragedy they portray that encompass what Garapa is all about.
Like the problem it deals with, you can't just watch it and establish what's right, what's wrong or how to fix it.