erikgabrielhr

My biggest turndown with Invisible Life's biggest competition inside Brazil this year ('Bacurau') was the excess of metaphors to make it a smart work -- some of which have absolutely no contibution to the story. Still, it was able to provoke a lot of emotional reactions, it's specially smart and meaningful to watch from a Brazilian perspective. Invisible Life is something different, it's universal, delicate and rough at the same time, and it's story has no need to explaining -- we all know what it is about. Still, they explain (the only reason why it's not a 100% for me). Carol Duarte and Julia Stockler are incredible. Also need to mention the short appearance from Brazil's greatest actress of all time, Academy Award nominee Fernanda Montenegro, not only for the name but mostly because, after 120 minutes of the movie, her performance was still able to reach out to the emotions you built for the characters in the past 2 hours. Overall, absolutely beautiful. The film is a visual spectacle, but also a beautiful and touching story.

Straight to the point, the movie's speech is as deep and profound as that from the white teenagers in the movie -- they also have in common the fact that both come from the medium and high classes in Brazil. Wagner Moura is brilliant here. It took a while for Brazil to figure out what this movie meant. Thankfully, international media saw it right away. That's comforting somehow, but tells a lot about LatAm dictatorships' legacy. Nevertheless, this is exactly the type of entertainment Brazilian extreme-right should be aiming at. Thankfully, it's going to be hard to find professionals good enough who would do this consciently -- clearly not the case in Elite Troup.

Antonio das Mortes is a great example to understand Brazilian 'Cinema Novo', but also, to understand the complexity of social relations in the country, specifically in the northeastern region -- Brazil's poorest desertic region. Three groups of people are presented to the viewer. The 'Coronel' is the one who owns the land and controls the local authorities. The medium classes are represented by the 'Doctor', the 'Teacher' and the Catholic church -- all of them responsible for mantaining the structures of power that allow unequality to perpetuate. Lastly, the miserable people, who are led by the 'Cangaceiro' and the 'Santa' and are represented mostly by women of color, who lean on faith and popular culture to unite against poverty and starvation. The language, as in most of 'Cinema Novo' films, is overly artistic, caricatured and very little realistic at times. Theatrical acting and visual poetry are resources to tell the narrative of the film, and they do well, but sometimes the scenes are very disconnected from human logicality -- at times, the characters are simply unreasonable. Nonetheless, that is exactly how it is supposed to be. This movie is art by art, with a social narrative that fits perfectly in the times where unequality grew the most in Brazilian history. At the end of the day, the killers and the martyrs were all the same -- people.