Bacu­rau – first look review

Something’s amiss in the tucked-away cor­ner of Brazil that lends the lat­est film from Kle­ber Men­donça Fil­ho and Juliano Dor­nelles (Mendonça’s long­time pro­duc­tion design­er, now pro­mot­ed to co-direc­tor) its title and set­ting. The road into the dusty town cen­tre is lit­tered with wood­en coffins that water deliv­ery trucks plow through with no mind paid.

One day, out of nowhere, Bacu­rau van­ish­es from online maps. The col­lec­tion of eccentrics and inscruta­bles mak­ing up the pop­u­lace pop a psy­chotrop­ic pill before momen­tous occa­sions – funer­als, all-out assault against a band of maraud­ing tourists intent on leav­ing the area strewn with car­nage in their impe­ri­al­ist wake, that sort of thing.

What begins as a fic­ti­tious sal­vage ethnog­ra­phy, as the cam­era doc­u­ments the ins and outs of life in a unique cul­tur­al space threat­ened by encroach­ing glob­al­i­sa­tion, tromps into the untamed wilds of genre ter­ri­to­ry as what could char­i­ta­bly be labeled a ​“plot” gets a‑kickin’.

While the ten­drils of the out­side world have begun to creep into the Bacu­rau enclave, bring­ing politi­cians and the bribes they think will win over this proud peo­ple, the locals have main­tained some sem­blance of pri­va­cy and self-suf­fi­cien­cy. The change to their sta­tus quo goes from incre­men­tal to extreme with the arrival of a homi­ci­dal safari par­ty in the region, led by Udo Kier in a role suf­fused with his inim­itable Udo Kier-ness (i.e. preen­ing, unwa­ver­ing menace).

Men­donça and Dor­nelles draw their bat­tles lines ear­ly, in lumi­nes­cent paint the colour of fresh­ly spilled blood. Bacu­rau rep­re­sents an Eden in its final prelap­sar­i­an days, slight­ly less idyl­lic while no less sacred. Kier and his play­ers of the most dan­ger­ous game, clad in heinous wrap­around shades that just scream ​“West­ern excep­tion­al­ism”, embody the tox­ic influ­ence of colo­nial states wher­ev­er iso­la­tion­ist com­mu­ni­ties wish to be left alone.

The script lays their half of the action on a bit thick, though the bald­ly stat­ed jin­go­isms may be a side effect of two native Por­tuguese speak­ers writ­ing in Eng­lish. At any rate, they’d rather let their exten­sive col­lec­tion of antique firearms do the talk­ing for them. The par­tic­u­lars of this con­flict make the film a far more bizarre and bewitch­ing view­ing expe­ri­ence than it might sound on paper. That bit about the guns all being vin­tage as a rule, for instance, goes unexplained.

Men­donça and Dor­nelles like to wait before clar­i­fy­ing cer­tain images with con­text, mak­ing such ele­ments as the sud­den appear­ance of what appears to be a UFO even more strange and oth­er­world­ly. Until the bul­let-strewn grand finale, the direc­tors keep us in a sus­pend­ed state of baf­fled won­der. Jabs of gal­lows humour fur­ther con­found, dis­rupt­ing what could oth­er­wise be a mil­i­tant­ly grim tone with japes we’re not sure we’re allowed to laugh at.

It all amounts to one sub­lime­ly unusu­al beast, a rad­i­cal depar­ture for Men­donça while at the same time teth­ered to his ongo­ing inter­est in orner­i­ness and its lim­it­ed util­i­ty. His last pic­ture ele­vat­ed the stub­born streak of a woman (Sonia Bra­ga, back again in Bacu­rau as the res­i­dent doc­tor) refus­ing to vacate her apart­ment build­ing to hero­ic heights, and afford­ed her only a pure­ly pyrrhic victory.

By expand­ing the square footage of this bit­ter face-off, ratch­et­ing the stakes up to mass mur­der from real estate nego­ti­a­tion, and embrac­ing gonzo shootouts in the grand­ly gris­ly tra­di­tion of Peck­in­pah, he’s achieved a new cin­e­mat­ic high. That last word isn’t used idly, either, not for the crowds here at Cannes; run­ning on three hours of sleep in a coun­try far from home, the unex­pect­ed fusion of semi-auto­mat­ic action with politi­cised fury feels like its own drug.