Vazante

Good photography. Good performances. Predictable script. Completely boring rhythm.

The only positive is good photography. After that nothing is good. Very boring rhythm, the story jumps around and it does not explore anything deeply. Painful to watch.

This is a slow rolling tsunami of a story that few will be able to fully appreciate, relate to, understand or even want to. It's obviously not for just anybody's senses or general sensibilities who have no relative interest or insights to what colonialism, slavery, suffrage and persecution looked and felt like in that era. Hard to imagine the domination of one human being over another's that's meant to build a pathway for a proper lifestyle to a higher existence while effectively dousing another human being's hope's and dreams of something similar.

This movie is laced with a cluster of nuances, and undercurrents of things unsaid, lost expectations, racism, white man's mentality and child lust. The world is full of wonderment in the eyes of youth, no matter their different circumstances. Yet loss plays a central part in this story from husband to widower and slave owner at the cost of many. You can feel their breath is palpable and inhaling things they can't fully comprehend like disillusionment, disconnectedness, fear, aloneness.

Vazante doesn't shout out at you nor does it whisper of things that can arrive to bend and break you. It's a sad, heartbreakingly provocative story that is still being explored, re-written and acted out badly in various ways everywhere.

This visual arresting film is about 1800s colonial life in central Brazil depicting the harsh life of slavery plus a forbidden love story and vengeance. Its cast produces wonderful performances like the main protagonist, "Antonio" played by Adriano Carvalho.

The story unfolds as "Antonio" tends to his settlement, a place of numerous slaves and marries his recently deceased wife's teen niece, "Beatriz" (played tenderly by Luana Nastas). The strength of this story is the focus on gender, since its female characters dominate this film. From the master's maternal household to the slave women used for sexual affairs and labor for Antonio, this cast of diverse women characters solidify the storytelling.

This film is met with visceral imagery as it was shot entirely in black and white. Thomas's depiction of plantation work and visual references of Minas Gerais (known for its mining history) follows great Brazilian photographic traditions. There is almost no music soundtrack (although Brazilian legendary musician, Tom Ze has a track in the film) letting the viewer take in sounds from the landscape of birds chirping to food cooking throughout the house.

Pacing, plotting, and storytelling clearly aren't this director's forte. I don't know what her forte is, but it's definitely not making watchable films. This travesty jumps around wildly from scene to scene, never letting you know if it's the same instant or weeks or months later. The characters' motivations are inscrutable and never explored, and what little information we do get is supplied through forced, clunky exposition between characters. Truly terrible.