243. Brazilian directors Juliano Dornelles’ and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film “Bacurau” (2019): Structurally similar to Hollywood films but refreshingly different in presenting a realistic canvas of Brazilian characters and contemporary problems of that wonderful, diverse country

The first impression of a viewer of Bacurau would be that it is structured in many ways similar to any recent Tarantino film or the way a traditional Hollywood Western is assembled: the bad guys making the life of the good people a living hell until the good people get external help to rid the bad guys while the audience experiences a cathartic orgy of violence and gore towards the end of the film, when the good people emerge victorious over the evil characters. 

Is Bacurau a film that offers much more than that? The Cannes film festival jury thought it was the second best film in competition, sharing the honour with Les Miserables (2019), a film that had little to do with Victor Hugo. Was Bacurauless impressive than the Korean film Parasite, a film that won the top honour at the Cannes festival in the same category, which also had a similar orgy of violence at its end? Debatable, indeed, because Parasite deals with economic disparity in urban life while Bacurau deals with much more: economics, politics, sociology, ecology, and even human hunting as a depraved sport for the rich.

Funeral procession for a dead matriarch.
(Coffins are constant reference points in the film.)

While Parasite is a clever reworking of Michael Haneke’s two film versions of Funny Games (1997, 2007) and Claude Chabrol’s  La ceremonie (1995), Bacuraupresents a deeper sociological and economic canvas that is arguably more realistic and fascinating than the slick and glib Korean film, despite Bacurau’s ridiculous drone without helicopter blades or other conventional propulsion aids to make it fly.  The desolate town of Bacurau in Bacurau does not exist in reality. Yet Bacurau presents a very realistic future scenario where the rich and powerful can remove entire towns and villages from satellite images that can be accessed on the internet for a short time without the rest of the world noticing the difference.

Teresa (Barbara Colen) returns to Bacurau,
when her grandmother dies

Why did  the screenplay-writers call this fictional place Bacurau, which one learns is the Portuguese name of a bird—the night jar—found in southeast Brazil?  The nightjar is unique because of two rare factors—it can easily go into torpor, with reduced body temperature and metabolic rate, enabling it to survive periods of low food availability and it can naturally camouflage itself with tree branches and leaves for survival.  The allegory of the bird and the simple world of the fictional Bacurau’s population will be more apparent to those who have visited Brazil. In the film Bacurau,the town’s population battle the manmade decrease in water availability—in a country where some parts are blessed with the abundance of water from the mighty Amazon River.

Bacurau begins with visuals of a modest water truck that navigates ill maintained roads to a town that survives with a church, a school, a museum (where it records past denizens who revolted against injustice) , a whorehouse, a small hospital, a farm with horses and a diverse population that represents the varied races of human beings all living in harmony--a microcosm of Brazilian social reality today. Is the ecology sustainable without adequate drinking water? Can a remote town survive without adequate supply of food and medicines?

"Doctor" Domingas (Sonia Braga) with blood-splattered coat

The Brazilian co-directors (Filho had made the acclaimed recent film Aquarius with actress Sonia Braga, who also has a significant role in Bacurau) underscore the bias of Brazilian politicians who neglect fringe populations living in remote areas in preference to wealthier populations living in better endowed areas of the country to get re-elected.  They add to this scenario  the profile of the inconsiderate politicians who supply medicines that are either banned or beyond their expiry date and dump second hand books for the library transported in dumpsters all in the name of aid. Then there are politicians that divert canal water, protected by armed guards, which could have served the town of Bacurau that needed the water, to other projects that serve the politicians’ own narrow interests. When the local politician arrives with his gifts, the population of the town hide behind closed doors just as the nightjar bird is prone to hide by camouflaging itself.

Into this bleak scenario, co-directors Dornelles and Filho add another and more deadly and sinister element—the sport of rich individuals from Europe and USA to kill human beings in Bucarau and its surrounding areas targeting  those are not white (just as hunters used to kill wild animals) with the assent of local Brazilian politicians. Dornelles and Filho even add rich Brazilians (referred to in the credits as “Foresteiras”) who are in this group of bizarre, racist individuals who kill humans without remorse.  This group is led by a character named Michael (played by Udo Kier, who has worked with Lars von Trier in Breaking the Waves and Europa and has a cult following for his appearances in gory,  horror films). One would have expected actor Kier to have been stony faced at the Cannes premiere of Bacurau but according to IMdB trivia Kier cried for the first time in his 50 year career “because of the whole experience of filming (Bacurau)”

Domingas (Braga) offers Michael (Udo Kier)  soup

There are many details in Bacurau, which will ring a chord with Brazilian audiences as there are references to real life people in Brazilian history, people who fought against injustice n the past.  Bacurau brings back memories ofgreat Brazilian filmmakers of the past who made films that are unforgettable such as Ruy Guerra (The Guns, 1964, winner of the Silver Bear at Berlin festival) and Glauber Rocha (Entranced Earth, 1967, winner of the Grand Prize at Locarno festival and FIPRESCI prize at Cannes festival). Bacurau might not boast of the high production qualities of Parasite, but it is a film that reminds you of the Brazilian films of Guerra and Rocha.

Michael (Kier),  the lead remorseless human hunter

Like the nightjar, the people of Bacurau prove that can “eat” human insects. And it offers more food for thought than a Tarantino film or a regular Western. 

(The film is showcased at the 2019 Denver Film Festival, USA, opening shortly, which has a major focus on Brazilian cinema.)

P.S.  Bacurau won the Best Film and the Best Director awards at the Lima Latin America Film Festival., the ARRI /OSRAM Award for the Best International Film at the Munich Film Festival, and the Best Director Award, the Carnet Cove Jury Award, and the Critics’ award  at the Sitges Catalonian International  Film Festival.  Lars  von Triers’s Breaking the Waves (with Udo Kier and mentioned in the above review) has been reviewed earlier on this blog (click on the name of the film in this postscript to access the review)  and is one of the author’s best 100 films. The author has visited Brazil and interacted with its senior government officials who were planning and managing national agricultural projects in the late Nineties. 

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113. Centenarian Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira’s “O Estranho Caso de Angelica” (The Strange Case of Angelica) (2010): Mixing illusion and reality with the mystery of life and death

One is never sure if any hundred year old can walk or even talk coherently. When you see a feature film made by a '102+ '-year-old that can make the grade to enter the 2010 Cannes official Un certain regard section, your jaws drop. The 102 or 103 year old Manoel de Oliveira’s reported physical handicaps are limited to walking with the aid of a stick and a minor hearing problem and, believe it or not, is busy making another movie after the recent The Strange Case of Angelica.


The Strange Case of Angelica is indeed a ghost story but to classify it merely as one would be missing the wood for the trees. If one is looking for a good ghost story movie, one ought to see The Others or Yella, not this one. If one is looking for special effects associated with ghost stories, this is far from one that can be  recommended. It is definitely not a commercial film: it is merely a film that can make you think. It provides a cinematic repast for an audience that is able to look beyond the decades-old technicalities that would annoy the impatient, modern hi-tech cineaste. Rather than a typical ghost story, this movie is all about capturing the ephemeral beauty of this world of fleeting moments of Joycean epiphanies on film, if you will, for posterity,

Director de Oliviera is probably one of the very few film directors from the silent film era still making movies in the 21st century. He has made some 60 films in the past 80 years. But what is most remarkable is that his films have a certain transcendental quality, often imperceptible to many. The Strange Case of Angelica is a tale written by de Oliveira in 1952, a half century ago for the screen but only executed today. And therefore the purist would find contradictions in the conversations in the film on global warming that are anachronistic for a film that is set in the Fifties. But then this is a sensitive tale from a man who loves cinema, photography, and sound. Had de Oliveira made this film 50 years ago, I am very sure that the mature philosophical turn of the final product would have been missing. It takes a very old man who has lived through life’s many twists and turns to make a film like this one.

The Strange Case of Angelica is about a still photographer—the starting point of any one who loves cinema. The photographer is different, he eats little, he loves the radio, he is an introvert, and is a person trying to catch the elusive beauty of actions being erased by time. The photographer spends hours trying to capture for future generations the feel of a chain of farmers preparing a farm field to grow another crop while of all of them sing a chorus that provide a hypnotic rhythm for the actions of the group. Much later in the film, the photographer revisits the same spot and finds to his dismay the field preparation has been replaced by a clunky tractor—gone are the men and the song. Even though the camera of the photographer has captured the visual beauty, it is cinema that captures the sounds that will be lost in time. Cinema and photography can make time stand still by illusion. That is the precise beauty of the de Oliveira film.

The movie is somewhat autobiographical—de Oliveira was a farmer and obviously realizes that his days on earth are numbered. The photographer in the film is an extension of de Oliveira, the film director (in fact the actor is his real life grandson). Are the hoes in the hands of the farmers a subtle image of the grim reaper for an old man? The film is evidently a poem on the magic that you can find through the view finder capturing the elusive image that you wish can stay with you forever. Here in this film it is a moment of magic realism where a dead woman comes alive through the viewfinder. So is the image of the farmers. So is the bird in a cage.

The Strange Case of Angelica is much more than a tale of a dead woman coming alive in the mind of a young man. It is ostensibly a love story of two individuals who have never met in life, but is destined to meet and be together after death. The beauty of life and death is what this film captures through some amazing sequences. One such sequence in the film is of a cat staring at a bird in a cage, considering the prospect of the bird as its next meal. The cat’s delicious thoughts are hoed down by a dog’s bark—the cat soon realizes that it has to save its own skin. Another amazing bit of conversation in the film relates to a pet bird being fed the remains of an egg and the surprising death of the bird that results from the innocent action.




The film has much to do with philosophy—the opening quote in the film that I do not now fully recollect, had something to link time standing still and God in us. It is not without relevance that a trivial conversation within the film set in 1952 discusses “anti-matter searching for the precise opposite.” For the record the film’s tale revolves around a Jew in post-Second World War Catholic Portugal. A Jew encounters death of a Christian woman and a Jew deals with a photographic death and resurrection following visits to a Church. There is even a passing out in an olive grove. (Much of de Oliveira’s cinema contains suggestive Christian motifs for those familiar with Biblical passages.) The soul departs leaving the body behind. These are interesting images, not statements, in the film. Statements from the film have to be viewed in the context of visuals and sound.

This film has much for a viewer to reflect on. And film is not just a visual crossword puzzle to solve. It has an aural puzzle as well. The Chopin selection and application in the film needs attention. As the credits roll, you hear the very same chorus of the farmers that so fascinated the photographer earlier in the film. That’s de Oliveira’s nudge on the importance of sound that has a magic realism of its own. The bird in the cage flutters when death takes place elsewhere in the room. As the landlady closes the windows and draws the curtains to underscore death, you begin to reflect on this strange film that mixes hallucination, science, music and philosophy. It is a sensitive, delicate film that is unlikely to be appreciated by the conventional filmgoer who prefers a cut-and-dry tale. If you relish the film you will realize that this film could not have been made by a young person. Beyond the lack of modern craftsmanship lies a deep tale of mystery and philosophy rejecting modern machines (loud impersonal efficient farm machinery for one) and modern photography, all the while celebrating a mystical charm of the old world.

P.S. The German ghost film Yella was reviewed earlier on this blog.

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