Vidas Secas

I rented this movie just because I had read the good book by Graciliano Ramos, back in 1992 in high school. When I played the video tape I really enjoyed what I saw. The slow rhythm is not an obstacle for us who want to have a great time watching a movie. It's the other way around, we just can't leave it once we realise "Vidas Secas" is an impressive narration of the difficulties poor people have when they try to move from their dying land in order to start a new life in the city. It's really time to press "play" and sit back.

My rate 7/10

One of the 5 best brazilian movies of all times. That's the opinion of the brazilian critics, and became obvious for everyone who see the film. A precise recreation of the Graciliano Ramos masterpiece by the "father" of "Cinema Novo". Definitively, a classic.

Vidas Secas had that same neorealist, slice of life feel that Bicycle Thieves and Pather Panchali have, but it didn't do quite as much for me thematically. The big focus was on how it's very difficult to survive and work in the barren Brazilian desert. The thing the film does best is establish a clear atmosphere - the slow long shots of the expansive desert and realistic, character driven story do a lot to emphasize how difficult it is to live there. It's not a film where I was emotionally drawn into the lives of the characters, the way I was in Bicycle Thieves, and I found the major messages of the movie to be muddled (aside from the main theme of how difficult it is to survive there). The repetition of the scene asking for work early in the film was really odd, and the random pivot to the older boy asking questions about hell and getting into that can be explained but came a bit out of nowhere for me, as up to that point the focus was on the father's attempt to work and the family struggles. In general, it just felt like a well shot but somewhat shallow slow, slice of life Brazilian film. Maybe I've just been spoiled by some of the great neorealist films we've watched though, and I'm sure there are some elements I didn't notice.

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.

This film of Nelson Pereira dos Santos and another one called "Oz fuzis" or 'The guns' by Ruy Guerra are my favourite Brazilian movies. These films have mirrored the films of Mrinal Sen and Adoor Gopalakrishnan made in India at about the same time. The realism they offer and the rather unconventional use of the soundtrack affects the viewer, though seriously lacking in production quality. I know that most critics tend to classify these two Brazilian films as representative of the Cinema Nouvo, but I prefer to see the two as unusually impressive cinema, little affected by Hollywood. Vidas Secas in a way brings back memories of neo-realism in de Sica's "Bicycle Thief."

The later work of dos Santos failed to impress me. He seems to have burned out--improving in technical qualities but losing out on artistic vision.