Fight the power
BACURAU I Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho juggles guns and gravitas…
He might be a critical darling after directing Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius, but Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho is right now telling Teasers how he stalked John Carpenter after the horror legend gave a masterclass at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. He even managed to snap a photo of Carpenter meeting up with old pal Dario Argento, as the two of them greeted each other with a hug.
Maybe Filho’s fanboy admission shouldn’t come as such a surprise given his third movie, Bacurau, is a (mixed) genre movie set in the near future. A sci-fi-horror-thriller-western, it sees Teresa (Bárbara Colen) return to her home town to attend a funeral. Only something isn’t right: water’s in short supply, phone signals are fading, and a group of armed strangers are closing in.
“All of my films are about an invasion of some kind,” says Filho. “Aquarius [where a widow refuses to sell her home to a company] is pretty much Fort Apache! An invading force is a classic set-up for tension – look at Straw Dogs, Assault On Precinct 13, some of the film by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Hitchcock.”
True, but Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius are resolutely arthouse, while Bacurau leans in the direction of grindhouse with its oddball characters, gnarly kills, and the casting of Udo Kier. “I love genre,” grins Filho. “The history of Brazilian cinema seems to have been built on social realism, which is fine. But my generation is the first who didn’t grow up watching Rossellini and Italian neo-realism. I grew up watching Spielberg and Carpenter and De Palma. So my films will still be Brazilian, but they will have a different flavour.”
This blending of the Brazilian and the American goes deep, with Filho employing 50-year-old Panavision lenses in order to generate “a Hollywood look” to his Brazilian locations. But this is a movie with more than just looks going for it, arriving as it does at a time when Brazil has a far-right president. It’s not by accident that there are so many female and LBGT characters.
“We want to represent Brazil, because Brazil is diverse,” says Filho. “We wrote Bacurau two years ago, and our near-future was more absurd then than it is now.” To reveal more would be to spoil the film’s surprises, but let’s just say that the Haves treat the Have Nots with shocking disregard. “Brazil is a violent country,” sighs Filho. “We’ve seen atrocities in war, but not what happens in this film.” A beat. “Yet.” JG
ETA | 13 MARCH / BACURAU OPENS IN TWO MONTHS.