Vidas Secas

The illiterate migrants Fabiano (Átila Iório), his mate Sinhá Vitória (Maria Ribeiro), their two sons and their dog Baleia drift in the country of the Northeast of Brazil, fighting for their survival. They are hired by a farmer (Jofre Soares) in a slavery condition to take care of his kettle.

"Vidas Secas" is a classic of the Brazilian Cinema and the first movie of the "Cinema Novo" ("New Cinema"), a movement of the Brazilian filmmakers in the 60's that proposed to make low-budget movies with social concerns and rooted in Brazilian culture, which had the following slogan: "A camera in the hands and an idea in the head".

Nelson Pereira dos Santos made a masterpiece, certainly on of the best Brazilian movies ever. Based on a classic novel of the Brazilian literature of Graciliano Ramos, the reality and cruelty of the story is stunning. The black and white photography and the performances of the cast, including the dog, are very impressive, recalling the Italian Neo-Realism of Roberto Rossellini. This movie was made in 1963, the story happens in the 40's and presently the situation of the drought in the country of the Northeast of Brazil remains exactly the same, being one of our greatest national shames. My vote is ten.

Title (Brazil): "Vidas Secas" ("Dry Lives")

An itinerant family's search for a better life seems to lead nowhere. The husband finds work as a cowhand, the wife wants nothing more than a leather bed to sleep in.

The stark, black and white cinematography with which the sun-bleached, barren landscape was shot underscores the poverty the family is trying to escape. Kudos to the director who was able to coax an admirable performance from the family's dog. It's a totally engaging film w/ effectively subdued performances from the principals. Reminiscent of Italian Neo-Realist cinema, this makes for rewarding viewing, a cure for the summer blockbuster syndrome.

As the great director Nelson Pereira dos Santos was, he delivered a consistent movie on the harsh life conditions of scarcity and hunger in Northeastern Brazilian hinterland, adapting to cinema a major classic of the country's literature by Graciliano Ramos. Cinematography is spectacular and certainly this paramount Cinema Novo film inspired a later classic of Brazilian cinema: Cinema, aspirins and vultures. The footage shot with animals in Barren Lives is particularly impressive. Baleia is a charismatic character, being decisive on how much moving the film may be.

Arid land, poverty, suffering, this is the visit here. The story is about a poor family who eke a miserable life in a homestead in the Brazilian wilderness, but this isn't about a story, it's going through the motions of life, embodying, suffering the hardship.

I like here how it conveys the meaninglesssness, the limits of a world that goes on forever but offers so little to do. Drag your feet under the sun from here to there, pick up firewood, stir a thankless meal, herd bony cattle for the town rancher; a leather bed is their dream, denied until the end.

I'll have you imagine the film like sheets with patterns of life stitched on them that someone hung out in the sun and forgot, the sun has bleached the patterns, the wind and dust have battered them to a lean rough texture, the film is their aimless flapping in the wind.

So overall there's a godforsaken purity here that feels stumbled on to. This poses a dilemma. I can't watch something like this as aesthetic token when it involves the suffering of people, it wholly defeats the purpose. The question for me is how far or close is real life? Of course every shot has been staged, I'm talking about the registered perception; how much truth has seeped in with the dust?

With Bela Tarr, see, we know, reality is the canvas of place on which cosmogonic abstractions are drawn with history as the brush, time as ink. With Rossellini, it's the stage on which a play is enacted, often about the pursuit of a real fulfillment, a real self. Herzog is about this dissonance between staged and real (so much more effectively than Godard), with jumps of madness that blur and edge to purity.

Here it has all been so effectively bleached of difference. So I'm swept. But to a world I can only parch in. It works, in the end I can't wait to leave the place just like the characters who drag their feet away from there. As they do, the question on the children's parched lips is when will they finally become 'real people'? Meaning, in the context of this, that real life is a life of possibility, that lets you envision and create, look beyond suffering.

When it comes to quote unquote "classic" Neo-Realist cinema, Vidas Secas may go harder in a manner of speaking when it comes to depicting the harsh and unrelentingly grim conditions of the working poor as exemplified by this semi ill educated family, though it has much more of its success on the direction than the Italians or Satyajit Ray had in their works.

I think why their films stand up as greater than this film is that those directors had a... I don't know it sensitivity yo their subjects is the word (maybe it is that) but a certain complex yet simple and uncanny ability to find in the characters and actors in their stories deep wells of humanity, and there was some warmth to balance out the misery in those stories (think of the father and son in Bicycle Thieves or the little Apur in Pather Panchali). This film is all desolation and, as the kids asks as subtly as a brick to the face, a banal hell.

This isn't to say Vidas Secas doesn't have value today as a work of dark and poetic humanism, and its director Pereira dos Santos elevates the material through his use of long or extended takes on moments and his close ups are often extraordinary. There's this palpable sense of desperation that comes from how he shows the environment and how he let's it frankly speak for itself; what can grow out in these fields where things are dying and cattle are for no other use than being branded and to be herded until death, after all. And there is sympathy for this father despite/because of his ill education and critical thinking when it comes to his boss or being imprisoned - he's no less averse to being exploited than the cattle or animals on the farm.

I read someone say that this film seemed to come quite late or after the wave of working class focused Neo Realistic dramas, and perhaps there's something to that. But depicting a family and their dire straits isn't necessarily a method that has to stop just because things are (seemingly) better in other countries. There will always be those, especially on farms and villages of countries like Brazil, hard times and labor exploitation, and there's always an integrity to Peirera dos Santos's images.

If it isn't a film I'd revisit as much as like Umberto D (sorry but not sorry - Flike > Baleia, also poor Baleia, you know it won't work out for him because he's the happy one in this story) or Paisan, it's nevertheless an important film not because We Are Showing These People That Makes It Matter, but because the direction shows family and society through a lens that makes us bear witness and ask us to simply see others we (meaning us working class middle class dopes) normally turn our eyes in apathy. There's nothing to be apathetic about in this film - it's cold and brutal and a drag, but it's never boring.