O Exercício do Caos

This first film by Frederico Machado is a good try at observational storytelling, but in the end it became a frustrating audiovisual experience to me. As the film opens, the first shot (early at night, a church with three crosses, a man enters the church and sees a woman sitting on a bench) evokes those 1960s poignant dramas about poverty and oppression in the Brazilian Northeast, embellished with folkloric overtones and magical suggestions –it even takes place in the state of Maranhão, where Glauber Rocha made a short documentary in 1966. But then one, two, three beautiful mestizo girls with shiny hairs treated in beauty salons and designer clothes passing for poor garments, appear as peasants, play "ring around the roses", work very hard in their father's rustic yucca flour processor, and are lusted by the only men in sight, while the younger sister is visited by the ghost of her mother. As you try to process all this in your mind, the music of Béla Bartok and Alfred Schittke fills your ears every now and then, clashing with the images, but harmonizing with the secret plan of the highly educated director, producer, writer and cinematographer Machado: secret because it becomes a cryptic experience, but also because if you read what he intended to do (as descriptors, he mentions chess, sadism, Soviet cinema –Russian in the original text–, Dadaism, obscurantism, dogma, minimalism, sexuality, spirituality, universality, etcetera), he aimed way too high and his intentions were not transferred to the screen as he expected (and claims). As far as I am concerned, all the effort had an unfortunate estrangement effect on me, not in the way Bertolt Brecht proposes, but out of indifference to characters and situations. As a very beautiful poem by poet Nauro Machado (Frederico's father) closed the story, with images that may or may not have any connection to the verses or the early proceedings (it may work depending on your willingness to embrace the whole thing), I felt that this «existentialist thriller» had better intentions than results.

Following the daily work of a man and his daughters in a manioc plantation, "The Exercise of Chaos"is a fable set in the countryside of Maranhão, away from everything and from everyone. Divided in three chapters – Exercise, Limbo and Chaos – The film contains a free style that is rarely found in contemporary Brazilian cinema. Psychological and poetic horror inspired in Prokofiev, "The Exercise of Chaos" is first of all a film impregnated of cinema: the appreciatory spectators will see the non-pretentious influences of Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick, Andrei Tarkovsky, Roman Polanski and Robert Bresson (This last one is to whom Machado dedicates the film in the end credits). "The Exercise of Chaos" is a unique film in the contemporary Brazilian panorama. Without concessions, the film is at the same time rigorous and free, oscillating between horror and ecstasy, between heaven and hell. Raw at certain moments, "The Exercise of Chaos" takes us to the deepness of the countryside of Maranhão as a documentary; as the film advances, the director's camera goes always deeper into the heavens of the father- boss, played by Auro Juriciê. Elements of horror cinema are very present in contemporary Brazilian cinema. In "Hard Labour" or "Neighborhood Sounds" there is a certain seduction with the horror genre. In "The Exercise of Chaos", Machado reaps many elements of the genre such as the sound, darkness the visions and ghosts adapting them to his vision of cinema: a free and rigorous, requiring the viewer to see through the director's eyes. Is it a horror movie? Is it a drama? Is it an experimental film? I don't know and I don't want to know: we are talking about a strong film that will not need labels to be framed.