By Ela Bittencourt
Carlos Reygadas, 'Post Tenebrus Lux' (Light after Darkness), 2012
The 14th Rio International Film Festival, the largest in Latin America, chose as its official seat this year a spacious naval warehouse, along a dusty road leading to the international airport, with trucks and buses bustling by nonstop. The warehouse is part of a larger zone whose neglected, empty buildings are slated to be eventually brought back to life by urban developers; as a festival seat, it helped stress Rio de Janeiro’s connection to its port and to Brazil’s colonial past. And while the festival’s huge number of screenings, over 400, didn’t yield too many memorable experiences, with national productions leaning towards conventionality, there were some, and not all foreign.
Leos Carax’s sci-fi Holy Motors was highly anticipated, not the least because the director was present, coming back from a creative hiatus of more than a decade. Unlike his apparently brief appearance and clipped responses in Cannes, he was warmly received in Rio, and even seemed to enjoy himself, by the side of his star, Kylie Minogue. Holy Motors features the protean Mister Oscar, played brilliantly by Denis Lavant, as an idiot savant, a martial arts freak, and a thug who gets knifed by his doppelganger, among others, before he turns out to be an actor, driving from gig to gig in his limousine. Carax suggested in a press conference that his film was a metaphor for the human condition, in which case Oscar might be Everyman, slipping between social masks. His fleeting experiences and wildly shifting moods make getting a grip on acting, or life, look slippery, in Carax’s dizzying mishmash of genres, from sci-fi, art-house and noir to musical melodrama.
No other director matched Carax’s quixotic inventiveness, but Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas (who won Best Director in Cannes) and Korea’s Kim Ki-Duk (winner, Best Direction in Venice) came closest. Reygadas’s Post Tenebrus Lux (Light after Darkness), features a red, hoofed Satyr, inviting a reading of his film as a fantastical moral fable: Forty-something Juan brings his family to the countryside, presumably to cut himself off from civilization’s discontents, but his fixation on porn brings him closer to the local farmers, and exposes how countryside’s misogyny and violence clash with the idyllic vision of pristine pastures. With rich colours and image blurs and distortions, Reygadas’ pastoral is full of lurking portents, even if its tones, from dreamy to deadpan, don’t entirely cohere.
Kim Ki-Duk, ‘Pietá’, 2012
Kim Ki-Duk’s Pietá has been vilified by critics as grossly Oedipal, and its malevolent characters border on cartoonishness.: Lee, hired by a ruthless loan shark to collect exorbitant sums from debtors or to maim them, is stalked by a woman who claims to be his mother. Lee rapes her but then, in a bizarre twist on filial love, develops a conscience, questioning the value of the money he’s extorted. The denouement to Pietá is incongruous, but it has surprising moral gravitas: In Ki-Duk’s dystopia, the poor suffer because of bad luck and ignorance, having taken out loans that they cannot repay; the higher powers do nothing to help them, allowing opportunists to flourish.
Most heartening in Rio was the showing of talent among young South and Central American filmmakers. Of these, Mexican Michel Franco has only made two features and Argentine Maximiliano Schonfeld and Brazilian Kleber Mendoça Filho just one. All three came to Rio with prior honours: Franco’s After Lucia had won the Prix Un Certain Regard in Cannes, Schonfeld’s Germania was a Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente winner, and Filho’s Neighboring Sounds had won the International Federation of Film Critics prize in Rotterdam, and would go on to win in Rio for best feature and best screenplay, in the only competitive section, Première Brasil.
Michel Franco, ‘After Lucia’, 2012
The three films were notable for their interpretative openness. In After Lucia, a father and daughter, Alejandra, move to Mexico City to start a new life. Alejandra has sex with a boy who records it and uploads the clip. Her harassment culminates with her being raped on a school trip. Franco trumps causality: He introduces the death of Alejandra’s mother in a car accident, and shows how grief distances father and daughter, as they adopt brave public faces, but he leaves open the question whether Alejandra’s need to please, and her willingness to tolerate abuse and to withstand insurmountable psychological pain, are in any way connected to her trauma.
Maximiliano Schonfeld, ‘Germania’, 2012
Evil, viewed through a distanced, sociological lens in After Lucia, turns mystical in Schonfeld’s Germania: A German family must leave their farm when their animals fall ill, and neighbors fear a plague, evoking a spectre of sin. Much of the film’s tension lies not in what occurs, but the ambiguity with which it’s captured: The young girl, Brenda, is pregnant; as the stigma around her family tightens, the paternity of her baby remains unclear, casting doubt on Brenda’s closeness to her brother, Miguel, and her father’s untimely death. While the film’s rapturous cinematography, by Soledad Rodrigues, gives it an idyllic look, the mystery hints at a paradise lost.
Miguel Gomes, ‘Tabu’, 2012
Filho’s achievement is best framed by another festival standout: a special programme of Portugal’s contemporary cinema, with guests João Pedro Rodrigues and Teresa Villaverde. I spoke to both about the challenges they face, as Europe’s financial crisis continues and Portugal’s conservative government has dissolved the country’s Ministry of Culture. As if to counteract grim reality, Rodrigues’s retrospective and his The Last Time I Saw Macao, Villaverde’s Swan, and Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, all bore the marks of ambitious and playful auteur cinema. Swan was the most intimate, a portrait of an artist whose growing responsiveness to others awakens her appetite for life; while The Last Time I Saw Macao and Tabu evoked colonial past, albeit through a Nietzschean lens, where history comes back as farce, or pastiche.
João Pedro Rodrigues, ‘The Last Time I Saw Macao’, 2012
The Last Time I Saw Macao particularly is a spoof on colonial imagination: Although shot entirely on location, its China is wildly invented. The unidentified narrator returns to the place of his birth to rescue a friend embroiled with the local mafia. What follows, on the surface, are missed encounters, a kidnapping and a murder. Macau emerges as a character in the film, as a former Portuguese colony and a bustling Asian city. As pastiche, the film alludes to Macao (1952) by Josef von Sternberg, whose exoticism was manufactured in a Hollywood studio. Rodrigues and da Mata evoke the artifice, taking a prosaic element of Chinese culture – a birdcage – and turning it into an objet-clef in an apocalyptic criminal conspiracy, giving it an entirely new, pseudo-occult meaning.
Portugal and Brazil both reflected on colonialism, but in Brazilian films, the notion of the other was internalized. Kleber Mendoça Filho dealt with it most extensively in Neighboring Sounds, capturing a cross-section of social classes on one block in his native Recife, which has undergone rapid real-estate development. The colonial past, a source of power and status for real-estate magnate Francisco and his clan, is also the cause of the great disparity between the have and have-nots, creating an aura of mistrust, isolation and fear. The past persists in modern habits and attitudes, signaled by security services, electric fences, and guard dogs. What resonated with Brazilian audiences was particularly the film’s humour: From residents spying on doormen with candid cameras, to absurdist co-op meetings, Filho has captured his fellow Brazilians’ foibles in ways that can be dark and unsettling, but for the most part sparkle with humanist irony.
Overall, in Prèmiere Brasil, films that borrowed heavily from melodramas and television (particularly Brazilian telenovelas, or soap operas) predominated. Among the ones I saw, Invisible Collection, Eden, Between Valleys, Jonathan’s Forest and Search (or Father’s Chair), all suffered, to varying extent, from forced sentiment, at the cost of character development, editing, and complex storytelling. A missed opportunity, firstly, because Brazilian actors such as João Miguel (best actor in Rio in 2011 and 2005) deserve more complex roles; secondly, because from what I saw during sold-out screenings of ambitious foreign films, at least some Brazilian viewers are hungry for more challenging fare. As Brazil continues to grow and more money flows into the arts, including film, and more foreign filmmakers look to it for partnerships, it seems particularly vital that the local directorial talent also continues to be cultivated.