Praia do Futuro

beautiful, bitter, useful. a film about relations and choices. delicate poetry and good performances. not comfortable but touching for its honesty, for the landscapes, for the dialogs and for the grace of silence. a film about love and its decision, about guilt feelings and about gestures who are only exercise to know happiness. about the responsibility. and about the past who remains the skin of present. short- a beautiful film. not in ordinary manner but that detail defines it. because it is the work of an admirable director who use the right nuances for a story who might be almost cruel. a gentle speech about the sense of life.

Actually, this movie does not bring anything new to the Brazilian cinema.

I found its story totally lame. What about this synopsis after all? And it solely relies on the (already-way-too-mainstream) shocking sexually-appealing feature.

Also, German seems like the easiest language to be learned by a regular Brazilian, as the confusing time line does not allow to understand how long the main character spends on Germany. Same for his young brother, for whom the language-learning process has - again - a lame explanation.

Score is 3 out of 10 just for the few nice shots, even though the slowness of this movie is definitely boring.

As beautiful a cinematic essay on the subject of fear as I've seen in a while, Karim Aïnouz's "Futuro Beach" manages to cover a plethora of fears common to the human condition - fear of solitude, fear of commitment, fear of rejection, fear of change, fear of death (hell, even fear of water is covered) – and the remarkable human ability to overcome them.

Donato (Wagner Moura) is a lifeguard at a Brazilian Beach who is only able to save one of two German tourists from drowning. Having never had to face death before, he reaches out to the surviving tourist Konrad (Clemens Schick) and soon finds himself in a complex relationship that leads him to question who he is and what he wants from life. Faced with making difficult choices, including the decision to abandon his younger brother and mother and relocate to Germany to join Konrad, Donato finds that his fears have followed him. Eventually isolating himself from Konrad and still unable to deal, he finds himself living a solitary life until he comes face-to-face with his past. Only then can he finally begin the journey of self-acceptance necessary to move beyond the fears that have held him back from experiencing a full life.

Cinematographer Ali Olay Gözkaya's stunning photography captures the natural beauty of the Brazilian and European locations and enhances the story's mood and tone. Performances are strong from the two principals and the two actors playing the younger brother Ayrton, ages 10 and 18 (Sávio Ygor Ramos and Jesuíta Barbosa,) also acquit themselves nicely. The scenes with the two brothers ably capture the special bond often shared between male siblings.

Often jumping from moments of quiet and solitude to scenes with pulsating sounds and action, "Futuro Beach" grabs you from its opening shots of motorcyclists dwarfed by the turbines of a wind farm to its concluding POV imagery of another motorcycle trek down an endless road at dusk. It excels at cinematically and dramatically capturing a snapshot of the often emotionally treacherous voyage that is life.

Rather introspective, this Brazilian/German film, with little plot and a lot of propositions easy to follow, but maybe not that easy to understand. The story centers on a safeguard attracted to a man he saves. They soon go for sex, softly depicted in the movie. Next they go to Germany, in a process of inner evolution for the Brazilian lead that may be difficult for the appetite of American audiences, little is spoken. A Brazilian like me does understand it better, for it's a dilemma most common for a man divided between its original family and a life he thinks ought to be better. The principals are the continuum of the film, both handsome, specially the well-built safeguard. It was already discussed that the word 'love' is not part of the plot. Not a single time it is mentioned they could experiment this sentiment to one another, and one will really have to speculate on which were the inner movements that made the Brazilian immigrate. Not an easy film, but I think it worth the effort. A trivia: in Brazil, where Wagner Moura is well known and the film went to commercial circuit, the sex scenes were a scandal. So much so that audiences where advertised in the tickets about the subject.

The thing that struck me the most about this movie is how beautiful it is, and I mean literally, aesthetically. Not only is the scenery gorgeous, but also its camera work is outstanding: Praia do Futuro's shots are absolutely amazing, most scenes could be made into pictures to be hung on the walls of an art gallery - there could probably be a whole exposition just made with screenshots of this movie.

The film's appeal, however, doesn't go much beyond that. Its plot had potential, the trailer made it seem like it would be intense and deeply emotional, yet the whole story is quite dull, with some unclear or poorly explained parts and underdeveloped dialogue. The characters don't lack depth per se, but their personalities were rather shallowly explored, perhaps hindered by the lack of vocal expression or by the stumbling plot.

Contrarily to what a review I read (in another website) suggested, I did not feel like this movie was too cliché-ridden, and the unoriginal moves were fairly understandable, as they could be justified by either the situation in which they were inserted or the characters' psyche. Yet, I feel the innovative elements were obscured by the overall dephtlessness of the whole production and great ideas and quotes were lost in senselessness and barely-existent dialogue.

This is definitely not a bad movie, it was just not enough to touch or affect me in any way.