BRAZILIAN GENRE MASHUP ‘BACURAU’ SATISFIES
The town in the shocker “Bacurau” is fictional, a bit magical, at once ordinary and otherworldly. It’s filled with faces that have life etched in them, which helps deepen the realism. And while the story is set in the near future, it looks like the present: the charming landscapes, laughing children, crowing roosters, the grinning balladeer with a guitar. Then, the guns come out, history rushes in and a ghost pops by.
In the wild world of “Bacurau,” queasy humor meets razor-sharp politics and rivers of blood. An exhilarating fusion of high and low, the movie takes a shopworn premise — townsfolk facing a violent threat — and bats it around until it all goes ka-boom. Part of what’s exciting is how the filmmakers marshal genre in the service of their ideas, using film form to deflect, tease and surprise. The movie looks and plays like a Western but also flirts with dystopian science fiction and pure pulp. By the time the cult actor Udo Kier rolls up, it’s clear that anything gleefully goes.
It’s also obvious that the writerdirectors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles are having a good time, and they want you to have one, too. Dornelles has worked as a production designer on Mendonça Filho’s movies, including his sui generis “Neighboring Sounds” and “Aquarius.” Their partnership proves seamless on “Bacurau,” which flows despite a switch-backing story that starts with a truck bouncing along a remote highway, a woman riding shotgun. The countryside is green in the way of certain deserts, but empty coffins litter the road, along with a corpse.
It is quite the enigmatic opener, a variant on those puzzlers that begin with a body sprawled on the parlor floor next to a bloody candelabrum. But there’s no clever detective to put the pieces together. There’s also no obvious narrative blueprint and precious little exposition. There are instead beauties, mysteries and characters, like that passenger, Teresa (Bárbara Colen), who arrives in Bacurau on the day of a funeral. As Teresa walks through the seemingly empty town, dragging a suitcase, she passes its boozy doctor, Domingas (Sônia Braga, the one and only). And then Teresa hails a man who pops a hallucinogen in her mouth.
The filmmakers spend the first half of the movie introducing the town of Bacurau; they drop you in the middle of it — without an evident story — then nose around its streets and secrets. There’s a pretty white church, but it’s used for storage, and a sturdy little museum built of stone. More characters pop in, including Teresa’s sexy friend, Acácio (Thomas Aquino), who has bedroom eyes and a gun in his waistband. He may be a thief or an insurgent; it’s hard to tell.
In his earlier features, Mendonça Filho used different spaces and homes — a middle-class neighborhood, a derelict plantation, an apartment threatened with demolition — as conduits to ideas about history, community, surveillance and power. These same issues swirl through “Bacurau,” which eventually settles into a brutal, disturbing story about haves and have-nots, a social division that Mendonça Filho and Dornelles make ferociously literal.
Right before things heat up, two ominous strangers ride up to Bacurau. Like latter-day cowboys, they wander into a modest store filled with hanging animal carcasses and buzzing flies, a setting that’s as unassuming as it is skin-crawlingly creepy. When one of the strangers asks the female proprietor what the villagers are called, her son shouts “people!”
When the fight finally arrives, it’s by turns absurd and horrifying. The second half of “Bacurau” is unsparing in its violence, filled with gunfire, terror in the night and revolutionary fervor that skews pathological. After an hour of silky camera moves, amusing details and a deep sense of history, Mendonça Filho and Dornelles switch gears, fold in a homage to John Carpenter and go berserk.
‘Bacurau’ streams March 25-31 at kinonow.com/bacurau-mfahouston as part of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston arrangement with film distributor Kino Lorber.