RISE UP!
Given the far right’s backlash against human rights, the filmmakers’ inclusion of precisely those populations that are under attack—blacks, women, LGBTQ communities, other minorities—is a gesture as much of courage as it is of hope.
IN BACURAU, A REMOTE, ISOLATED TOWN IS ATTACKED BY A small group of armed, drone-assisted outsiders. The sertão, or backcountry, where the action unfolds, has often featured in Brazil’s popular culture and arts as a forbidding, uncharted, and parched territory. It is the country’s Wild West—a vast landscape marked by violent conquest and the resistance of the indigenous people and the black quilombos (communities historically created by runaway slaves).
Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s new film won the Jury Prize last year at Cannes, where it gave me one of my two most hair-raising moments during the festival’s screenings. Each happened when the social drama—in all its relatively recognizable, containable parameters—metamorphosed into fearsome, all-out genre action. One instance occurred in Bong Joon Ho’s juggernaut Parasite, when the struggling poor family assaults those even less fortunate. The other came in Bacurau, when the people of the convivial, quasi-utopian town—where tolerance and free love rule, and the goodly townsfolk gather to commemorate their deceased black matriarch, Carmelita—suddenly find out that they’re under attack. Immediately they dust off their cache of guns, and as they mercilessly defend themselves, carnage erupts.
One might call the sequence a carnival of blood, as the spectacle staged by Mendonça and Dornelles feels so highly performative, enhanced by the use of widescreen. Like Bong, the filmmaking duo presents us with protagonists whose humbleness in no way signals the ferociousness of their counterattack. But once horror is unleashed and Bacurau gears up, from complex exposé to full-throttled bloodlust western, it sure felt as if the images were shocking my nervous system. Yet equally rapid, almost uncannily so, is the villagers’ will to move on. Bacurau is a place that’s marked by violence, and yet its core ethos remains: to live and let live.
Who are these warriors of Bacurau? Among the town’s memorable characters is Domingas (Sonia Braga), the brazen local surgeon and reckless drunk and bigmouth—a remarkable role for Braga, whose past performances have often traded on sensuality, but who this time). Her fortuitous return from the city is mirrored by a similar regress made by her occasional lover, Acácio (previously known as Pacote, a deadly contract killer)—a detail that suggests that the town has an eternal hold on all of its inhabitants. Acácio is just one of many characters who prove as striking as they are elusive—the same could be said about the outlandish yet intensely likable queer bandit, Lunga (Silvero Pereira). All, however, are quickly absorbed into the communal hive of Bacurau. Like the capoeira dance, ’s logic, its very pulse, revolves around collective action, on and off the battlefield.
