The city of the shocking “Bacurau” is fictitious, a little magic, at the same time ordinary and supernatural. It is filled with faces engraved with life, which contributes to deepening realism. And although the story takes place in the near future, it looks like the present: the charming landscapes, the children who laugh, the roosters who sing, the ballader smiling with a guitar. Then the cannons come out, the story rushes and a ghost passes. (He smiles.)
In the wild world of “Bacurau”, nauseating humor meets sharp politics and rivers of blood. An exhilarating fusion of high and low, the film takes a worn premise – city dwellers facing a violent threat – and beats it until everything becomes a ka-boom. Part of what is exciting is how the filmmakers walk the genre in the service of their ideas, using the form of the film to deflect, tease and surprise. The film looks and plays like a western but also flirts with dystopian science fiction and pure pulp: bang, bang, splat. By the time cult actor Udo Kier arrives, it’s clear that everything is going happily.
It’s also obvious that the scriptwriters-directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles are having a good time, and they want you to enjoy it too. Dornelles worked as a production designer on Mendonça Filho films, including his sui generis “Neighbor Sounds” and “Aquarius”. Their partnership turns out to be flawless on “Bacurau”, which flows despite a tipping story that begins with a truck bouncing along a distant road, a woman who rides a shotgun. The countryside is green like some deserts, but empty coffins litter the road, accompanied by a corpse.
It’s quite the enigmatic opener, a variant of these puzzles that start with a body stretched out on the living room floor next to a bloody candelabra. But there is no smart detective to assemble the parts. (You have to do it yourself.) There is also no obvious narrative plan or precious little exhibit. Rather, there are beauties, mysteries and characters, like this passenger, Teresa (Bárbara Colen), who arrives in Bacurau on the day of a funeral. As Teresa crosses the seemingly empty city, dragging a suitcase, she passes in front of her arrogant doctor, Domingas (Sônia Braga, the one and only). And then Teresa greets a man who puts a hallucinogen in his mouth.
The filmmakers spend the first half of the film presenting the city of Bacurau; they drop you in the middle of it – with no obvious history – then nose into its streets and secrets. There is a pretty white church, but it is used for storage, and a small, sturdy museum built of stone. Other characters appear, notably Teresa’s sexy friend, Acácio (Thomas Aquino), who has eyes in the bedroom and a pistol on his belt. He can be a thief or an insurgent; It’s hard to say. The youngest inhabitants of Bacurau love to watch a recording of him performing people. It looks like a video game and it is the future, but life is still cruel, as is evident once again bloody corpses begin to pile up.
In her first reports, Mendonça Filho used different spaces and houses – a bourgeois neighborhood, an abandoned plantation, an apartment threatened with demolition – as led to ideas about history, community, surveillance and power. These same problems swirl through “Bacurau”, which ends up settling in a brutal and disturbing story about the haves and the have-nots, a social division that Mendonça Filho and Dornelles ferociously make literal. This can be read as a metaphor for Brazil (and the inequalities that disturb the world), but as “Seven Samurai” by Kurosawa, it is also a story deeply rooted in a precisely mapped place.
This place is the hinterland or sertão of Brazil and, more precisely, a quilombo, one of the many colonies originally founded by escaped slaves. In “Bacurau”, the filmmakers created a version of a regulation that Mendonça Filho, in an interview with Film Comment, called a “remixed quilombo”: “a black community, a historic place of resistance, but with some white people, indigenous, trans and other inhabitants. When some city dwellers halfway start practicing capoeira – a fighting game that emerged with enslaved Africans – they both communicate with this story of challenge and prepare for a new battle.
Just before things heat up, two disturbing strangers go up to Bacurau. Like the cowboys of the last few days, they wander in a modest store filled with carcasses of hanging animals and buzzing flies, a setting as modest as it is terrifying to the skin (much like this film). When one of the strangers asks the woman owner what the villagers are called, her son shouts “people!” The owner then explains that the city is named after a bird, and the stranger asks if it is extinct. Not here, said the Bacurau woman with a smile – it comes out at night and it is a hunter.
When the fight finally arrives, it is in turn absurd and horrible. The second half of “Bacurau” is unmatched in its violence, filled with gunfire, terror in the night and revolutionary fervor that skew pathological. There’s a bandit in the eyeliner, a fierce squirt (Silvero Pereira), and a gang of Americans right after a Hollywood eruption. After an hour of silky camera movements, fun details and a deep sense of history, Mendonça Filho and Dornelles change gears, pay homage to John Carpenter and go mad, unleashing a nightmare that is made all the worse by how strangely it looks like life.
Bacurau
Unclassified. In Portuguese and English, with subtitles. Duration: 2 hours 11 minutes.