Essential World Cinema: 5 Best Brazilian Movies

The national cinema of Brazil has an incredibly long and influential history. Its film output has ranged from epics and musicals influenced by the big Hollywood films of the studio era, to low-budget works of social criticism, to critically and financially successful international blockbusters.

Over the years, Brazil’s best films have tended to be their political ones. As a response to both the political turmoil of the 1960s and the Hollywood-mimicking films produced in Brazil up until that point, a number of filmmakers in the early 1960s began to make independent films that focused on poverty, rural settings, and social injustice.

Dubbed Cinema Novo in Brazil, these films quickly became the seeds for what would be known globally as Third Cinema, a non-commercial political film movement that sought to differentiate itself from the “First Cinema” of Hollywood and the “Second Cinema” of Europe by breaking away from the production and distribution models of traditional filmmaking. (As a side note, Senegal, which has also been featured in Cultured Vultures’ Essential Cinema column, was another important country to the Third Cinema movement).

Because of Brazilian cinema’s ties to political filmmaking, it should come as little surprise that all of the films listed below are political films.

 

Black God, White Devil (1964)

As mentioned, the 1960s and 1970s were defined by the Cinema Novo period. Beginning in 1960, this period of Brazilian cinema can best be understood as a response to political turmoil (including a coup that installed a military dictatorship in 1964) and socioeconomic inequality. Rejecting the Hollywood-style glamour of earlier works, these films were meant to emphasize the realistic living conditions of Brazil’s poor.

The period is a rich one, but perhaps the best film from the movement is Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil. Nominally a Brazilian Western, the film follows a rural peasant couple living in 1940s Brazil. A farm worker, Manuel, kills his boss in a rage over unfair treatment. While on the run, he and his wife join a revolutionary religious cult and end up involved in a continuous cycle of violence between the cult, the church, townspeople, and bandits. The film explores this violence and the exploitation of the poor, fitting topics for a society that was on the verge of a military coup.

The film was shot on a microscopic budget by a guerrilla crew (common practice for Cinema Novo filmmakers eager to avoid the strings of big production companies), and it looks it. But the documentary-style realism lends a weight to the narrative that would have been lost in the traditional Hollywood style. The couple’s poverty is portrayed as a brutal reality.

The film also takes a documentary style to its violence. The killings are brutal and shocking. While the film has plenty of shoot-outs, they are not shot in such a way as to romanticize or make the violence exciting. Instead they are shown in longshot, with the participants running over long distances, chasing each other, giving them a mundane quality that removes the element of spectacle. The effect is to make the viewer feel the crushing desperation of the protagonists’ lives rather than give them an emotional catharsis.

 

The Hour of the Star (1985)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGWu1vbdowQ

Technically, the Cinema Novo movement ended in the 1970s, but its influence casts a long shadow over the years to come. Suzana Amaral’s The Hour of the Star takes a similar view to deromanticizing poverty that we saw in Black God, White Devil.

The plot of the film follows Macabea, a poor (and probably intellectually disabled) woman working as a typist and sharing a tiny apartment with several other women. She ends up meeting a love interest in Olímpico de Jesus, a horrible man who yells at her for asking questions and complains about the cost of adding milk to her coffee. She is terrible at her job, and worse at her relationship, but remains unaware of just how bad she is at either.
In some ways, the film sounds like an exercise in enduring suffering, and that’s partially true. While brilliant, the film is a tough sit, but it is fitting here. Often, films portray poverty as beautiful, romantic, and even noble. The Hour of the Star strips it of these cinematic pretensions. There is nothing noble or heroic about Macabea’s suffering; it is not there to allow her to better herself or to overcome it, it simply is.

Which is not to say that the film does not have its share of brilliant, memorable images. A scene where the girls are talking about their favorite soap opera before rushing to the window to watch it on a television in a neighboring apartment building emphasizes how their poverty has robbed them of even simple pleasures, and the final sequence of the film (which I will not spoil here) uses the romantic Hollywood style the film had avoided to bitterly ironic effect.

 

Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)

1985 also saw the release of Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, a Brazil-America co-production that commented on the fantasies of the Hollywood style in a very different way. The film tells the story of two cellmates in a Brazilian prison under the military dictatorship. Raul Julia plays Valentin, a political prisoner, and William Hurt plays his cellmate Luis, a transgender woman being held for having sex with an underage boy. While Valentin initially finds Luis to be silly and frivolous, eventually the two form a tight bond and a loving relationship. Throughout the movie, Luis describes a movie she has seen to Valentin, and these scenes are recreated for the viewer. Valentin initially hates these movie scenes, but grows to depend on them as a means of escape, helping him to form a tighter bond with his cellmate. Their relationship is the strongest element of the film, and both Julia and Hurt give the best performances of their careers in these roles.

While the scenes within the prison are attempting a sort of realism (although nothing quite like that of The Hour of the Star), the sequences are shot in the glossy, glamorous style of classic Hollywood. The scenes are as beautiful as any Hollywood movie, but Babenco does not shy away from exposing their artifice. The film that so enamored Luis is in fact a work of Nazi propaganda, emphasizing how works of cinematic beauty can hide dangerous political messages. Nevertheless, Babenco does not completely criticize the Hollywood style, as it is this film that allows the two men to bond and leads to a political awakening of sorts in Luis.

 

City of God (2002)

Another film in the tradition of social realism, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s City of God looks at the lives of those living in the Rio de Janeiro slum, Cidade de Deus. The film focuses on the story of Rocket, a young inhabitant of the favela, who has an interest in photography. Throughout the film, he tries to satisfy his artistic ambitions while dealing with the pressures of living in extreme poverty and being surrounded by severe gang violence. Eventually he finds work at a newspaper and begins to earn a living photographing the gang violence of his home community.

In an attempt for greater authenticity, many of the film’s actors were actual residents of the slums. The move pays off, as the performances are strong across the board, and a big part of what makes the film so powerful. Alexandre Rodrigues is sympathetic as protagonist Rocket, and Leandro Firmino da Hora is despicable as the film’s villain, Li’l Zé.

For all its striving for authenticity, however, the film’s cinematic flourishes are what make it stand out. Rather than the documentary approaches of the Cinema Novo disciples, Meirelles and Lund take a page out of the book of 90s American Indie filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. The camera in City of God is incredibly dynamic; the film opens with the camera quickly chasing after a group of children trying to catch a chicken, and only really slows down in moments of calm where Rocket feels at peace. The effect is to make the viewer feel the constant pursuit and chaos of the characters’ lives and how they are always on the run.

 

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (2010)

A sequel to the lackluster Elite Squad, José Padilha’s The Enemy Within is easily the most enjoyable watch of the films on this list, and the most financially successful. In fact, the film was so successful that it landed Padilha a job directing the 2014 reboot of Robocop (which…just don’t).

The film’s plot will be familiar to fans of the crime genre. Roberto Nascimento is an officer in an elite Rio de Janeiro drug tas kforce who gets reassigned to a political post after a prison riot nearly costs him his job. He attempts to rid his agency and the police force of corruption while his wife’s new husband, leftist history professor Diogo Fraga, attempts to uncover the roots of the city’s political corruption. Both of the protagonists have satisfying arcs, and both of the actors (Wagner Moura as Nascimento and Irandhir Santos as Fraga) give compelling performances of two men on opposite ends of the political spectrum who begin to work together.

The political and socioeconomic themes present in the previous films are all here as well, but are given an action-blockbuster makeover. The film does not push boundaries or challenge expectations quite as much as the earlier films, but it is a lot of fun to watch. The action sequences are beautifully shot and exciting, and the characters are well-drawn. If you are looking for a smart action film, you can’t go wrong with this one.