Bacurau

Bacurau, borrowed from www.simbasible.com

So happy to share Bacurau here. I saw it yesterday at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). Directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles were scheduled to be in attendance but it was cancelled due to the corona virus spread. It’s sad but completely understandable. Bacurau means nighthawk, an ugly bird, and when I looked up its meaning, my heart quickened. It is in the title of my favorite children’s novel by my favorite Japanese author Kenji Miyazawa: “The Nighthawk Star” (Japanese title:よだかの星 (Yodaka no Hoshi).” It is a sad tale about a nighthawk, an ugly bird, who wanted to become a star. Miyazawa is probably the most beloved author in Japan and my 4^th grade class played this novel at a fall festival. I played Star 2 or Star 3 or Star 4. Haha. Our teacher chose the thinnest, and kinda most ugly boy in class, and he played the nighthawk beautifully. I almost cried watching him flying higher and higher and higher as I stood still as the Star 2 or Star 3 or Star 4 on stage :)

A short synopsis on IMDb goes: “After the death of her grandmother, Teresa comes home to her matriarchal village in a near-future Brazil to find a succession of sinister events that mobilizes all of its residents.” It won Jury Prize at Cannes last year, after Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or. In my view, Bacurau is much much stronger than Parasite.

The setting is a fictional small town in Northeastern region of Brazil called Bacurau. We learn in the beginning of the film that it’s a story of “a few years from now.” Yes, a few years from now. The slightly-ahead technology available in a tiny rural town in Brazil cleverly shows that it is a near-future sci-fi story. The residents in Bacurau is a beautiful mixture of colorful descendants of indigenous, African slaves, and Portuguese people, possiblly more. We see the hybridity in people’s varied skin colors and tones and hair kinkiness. The diversity is very attractive. Teresa is a light skin black woman with afro hair. We also see an old woman doctor with lighter skin and straight hair who seems to have been a close friend (or a rival? I gotta watch it again) of the deceased matriarch, a cowboy-like singer with a funky guitar, a mother and young son who run a small bar/bodega, a bloodthirsty fugitive gang head. A small whore house outside Bacurau houses a band of various sex workers including a trans person and they are integrated in the diversity of the town folks as fellow workers. The slightly saturated images make us almost smell the characters’ skin and feel the fries everywhere in the bloodshed. On top of that, the smart direction creates a peculiar atmosphere of Western-Sci-fi fusion. I don’t want to spoil so won’t mention much, but there is another group of people depicted in a stark contrast with the Bacurau residents, who look and sound so familiar to the world’s cinema viewers that their presence seem strange and wrong: the white people (which also have layers of course). Another important character is a local Brazilian politician. Villagers hate this man because he had stopped a nearby dam and caused Bacurau serious water shortage. Maybe you see the point now. In a setting of “a few years from now,” the film depicts the real decades-long problems of neocolonial Brazil – racism, mal use of natural resources, and massacre of minority tribes.

I teach Third Cinema at Hunter College and have seen quite a few Brazilian films. There are still so many films I’d love to watch. I have been deeply impressed by the genre-bending bandwidth and the imaginative scale of Brazilian cinema. The masterpieces made under the censorship of the CIA-supported military dictatorship in the 60-70s used allegories so smartly. How Tasty was My Little Frenchman was made based on the old texts from the 16^th century written by German and French missionaries/colonialists and used the image of cannibal Tupi tribes to express the Brazil's resilience that devours European culture and colonial intensions. Iracema takes its title from the name of a model tribal woman Iracema who was loyal to her missionary husband and flips that image by depicting a misery of an indigenous teenager who sells sex to survive along the controversial transnational highway which contributed to the stripping the Amazonian forests (for wood and cow business) and chasing and killing of indigenous tribes. Iracema the whore is depicted as Brazil itself. Bacurau too, via the near-future sci-fi mise-en-scène, seems to be criticizing the contemporary politics in Brazil and the people who keep robbing from Brazil:  Bolsonaro who became President in Jan 2019 through some sort of coup and who is known as a hater of women, LGBTQIA+, indigenous, and blacks and the big time promoter of the "development" in Brazil; the neo-colonial oligarchies who own and control the nation's resources and politics; and the white American and European elites who benefit from them. The beautifully diverse and hard-working people in Bacurau symbolizes Brazil itself, just like Iracema, and to me, through depicting how they are chased and erased, the film seems to be sending a strong supportive message to the indigenous communities of Brazil, larger Americas, and possibly of the world.

Some of the scenes and characters appear to be a direct tribute to other films. The water truck that carried Teresa in the beginning of the film running along the narrow road through the vast landscape of Northeastern Brazil reminded me of the truck that drives through the transnational highway in Iracema carrying trees and cows. The opening scene, the aerial shot of night light of Brazil reminded of the last scene of Nostalgia for the Light, a powerful documentary by a Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman. The spectacular fashion of the fugitive killer Lunga must be a tribute to some character, but I cannot nail it. The boyfriend of Teresa, this one is probably far off, looks like Baba in Salaam Bombay! to me. I have missed many more I’m sure. But with no concern to those connections, the film alone provides a strong story with a good dose of sex, naked body, blood, and politically correct messages. I haven’t read the reviews or interviews yet and look forward to reading some of them, but it seems it’s described as a crowd-pleaser. I was certainly pleased, especially when Teresa said “No” when her boyfriend asked if Lunga went too far. You’ll know what I mean… go watch it soon. You won’t be disappointed.