Up from slavery
VAZANTE, drama, not rated, in Portuguese with subtitles, Center for Contemporary Arts, 3.5 chiles
In Brazil’s Diamantina Mountains in the early 19th century, António (Adriano Carvalho), a wealthy cattleman, slave trader, and the head of a sprawling, isolated farmhouse, marries his twelve-year-old niece after his wife and infant son die in childbirth. Beatriz (Luana Nastas), his new child bride, seeks the comfort and companionship of the slaves when António abandons her on long trading expeditions. It’s the setup for a story that plays out on the level of Greek tragedy.
Vazante, directed by Daniela Thomas — the partner and longtime collaborator of Walter Salles and an accomplished playwright and filmmaker in her own right — contrasts the unforgiving realities of slave life with the luminous, hypnotic beauty of the Brazilian mountains and rain forests. The languid pace and stunning, silvery black-and-white cinematography by Inti Briones enhances a narrative that emphasizes the stark dualities in the beauty and darkness of the forest — as well as the binaries that exist with regard to free men and slaves, youthful innocence and adult experience, and gender roles. It’s a slow-burn motion picture that builds in intensity to a devastating conclusion.
Early in the film, António insists that his slaves wash his dead wife’s blood, which disgusts him, from the dead infant’s swaddling linens. He grieves more for the son he never knew than he does for his wife. The context is that women in colonial-era Brazil are born into a form of slavish servitude as the property of men, a suggestion that is made more plain later when he marries Beatriz, who has no real say in the matter. Beatriz lives better than the slaves and is above them in stature. But as the story plays out, the farmhouse itself is seen as a remote, haunted purgatory — a repository for Beatriz, along with the many servants who are uprooted from their lives and forced to live in close proximity to each other, unable to even comprehend one another’s language and customs. No one is at home here in this somber mountain setting surrounded by the dense, dark rain forest. And no one, save for António when he goes on his trading expeditions, can leave.
For António, the marriage to Beatriz is a social formality. He won’t permit himself to take sexual advantage, however, until she’s begun menstruating, choosing to take Feliciana ( Jai Baptista), a slave, to his bed instead. Thomas takes a tender approach to these women — including António’s mother-inlaw ( Juliana Carneiro Da Cunha), who, after her daughter dies, effectively becomes a nobody — relegated to haunting the corridors like a ghost.
Vazante brings a sharp focus to the racism that was endemic in Brazil during this era, transcending any compassion that is expressed by even its most empathetic characters — even Beatriz, whose romantic interest in a young slave boy named Virgilio (Vinicius Dos Anjos) sparks the violent atrocities of its final act. None of the protagonists are monsters, exactly, but rather people caught up in the expectations of a system that condemns them for acts of charity and kindness if those acts threaten the status quo. The characters are the unwitting players in a great game that’s beyond their control. Reconciling this beautiful-looking film — including its protagonists, António and Beatriz, whose soulful eyes seem to beg the audience for empathy — with the inhumanity it depicts seems an exercise in resolving contradictions, and generating catharsis.