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Bolsonaro’s Culture Wars Hit Brazil’s Cinemas

Bolsonaro’s Culture Wars Hit Brazil’s Cinemas

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Not long ago ultraconservative Brazilian voters fed up with the rotten political class came out of the closet to help elect a leader they could call their own. The result was right-wing Jair Bolsonaro and a deepening culture war. Now the ideological battles that have poisoned public discourse and set Brazilian against Brazilian have reached the cineplex.

Earlier this year, partisans squared off over the Netflix documentary “The Edge of Democracy,” an impassioned — or tendentious, pick your flag — first-person account of the impeachment of former Workers’ Party president Dilma Rousseff, which eventually cleared the way to Bolsonaro’s election. They will have at it again over “Marighella,” a forthcoming biopic on the Brazilian guerrilla who led an armed revolt against the military dictatorship. But first comes this season’s tirade, courtesy of “Bacurau,” a dystopian fantasy about a native community under siege by globe-trotting gringos with anger issues and heavy weapons.

Talented filmmakers — Brazil has many — might be expected to help show the way beyond the ideological furies that have consumed the national zeitgeist, and so help Brazilians re-imagine a better, more civilized society. “Bacurau,” which recently opened in national theaters after a festival debut and the jury prize at Cannes, isn’t that sort of picture. Instead of a balm, directors Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles went for conflagration.

Set in a dusty rural nowhere in Brazil’s impoverished northeast, “Bacurau” is the saga of an eponymous fictional town that endures hardship, loss and humiliation with valor and grace, and help from a homemade hallucinogen. Soon, invaders spoil the idyll, a catastrophe neatly presaged by the arrival of smooth-talking mayor Tony Junior (Thardelly Lima) who rolls into town amid campaign jingles to offer trinkets for votes and a promise to restore access to water from a reservoir that unnamed bigwigs have embargoed.

That’s nothing unusual for the Brazilian dust bowl, where water is electoral capital and local officials are tools, and good luck to everyone else. As it happens the mayor is in service to a darker force, a band of fair-skinned foreigners on safari, in which the residents of Bacurau are the hunt.

The stage is set for an uprising for which peaceable Bacurau is badly outgunned. Fortunately townsfolk have a secret weapon: a fugitive local crime boss named Lunga (Silvero Pereira) and his gang, who have fallen on hard times but have a reputation to keep. Here “Bacurau” tips a beret to a romanticized rebel past. Like the Cangaceiros, highwaymen of early last century who became folk heroes by robbing rich estates, Lunga and his band are eager to redeem their brand.

Bad hats forgoing petty crime to throw in with oppressed local folks against rapacious outsiders: It’s a tireless trope. Mendonca Filho and Dornelles embellish the genre with contemporary rainbow politics. The community makes decisions by consensus. Their society is a matriarchy where formidable women like local doctor Domingas (Sonia Braga) and returning native daughter Teresa (Barbara Colen) provide and protect, speak their minds and make love on top. Lunga is a pansexual outcast, part miscreant and part Che Guevara, who wears eyeliner, painted nails and megahair, and carries a silver six-gun and a machete.

Rendered through photographer Pedro Sotero’s gorgeous lens, these flourishes enlist the audience’s sympathy for the savagery that ensues. Bullet for bullet, it would do Sam Peckinpah proud.

Mendonca Filho and Dornelles disavow any intention of making an activist picture or sending a political message. All you need is a social media account to see through the disclaimer. “We are people. We are resistance,” one fan wrote on Twitter. “Bacurau” scored Brazilian cinema’s sixth-best box office take ever for a first-week debut. The film resonated especially in the northeast, the storied patch of hardscrabble where the tale unfolds but also, tellingly, where voters rejected Bolsonaro as a right-wing intruder or worse.

Not everyone was impressed, and the quarrel has spread beyond the arts pages. “A testament to the extinction of intelligent life on the Brazilian left,” University of Sao Paulo sociologist Demetrio Magnoli said in dismissing the film. That’s harsh, but by going over the top, “Bacurau” falls short.

Start with the cartoon-like fanaticism of the gringo invaders, marshaled by the cold-blooded proto-Nazi Michael (Udo Kier). The toxic rants of his band of misfits, borderline serial killers and xenophobes (“you guys are like white Mexicans,” says one) might embarrass even the most devoted red-state voters. Cue the heroic natives, who answer the marauders with a vintage Cangaceiro arsenal borrowed from the local museum. What’s a Kumbayah moment without a Colt 45?

The cliches might work in a farce, but this isn’t “Pulp Fiction.” “Bacurau” takes its straw men seriously. The community whips itself into a fever dream of chanting, clapping and Afro-Brazilian kick-dancing before the final stand against the invaders.

It’s an odd aesthetic for a nation wearied of cult politics and now beset by a ruling clan that says more guns make safer streets, indulges criminal militias and winks at yahoos and extremists dedicated to normalizing incivility. Brazil could do with clarity, not catharsis, never mind a chop-house fantasy cross-dressing as a revolution. But that’s another picture.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mac Margolis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He was a reporter for Newsweek and is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”

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