Bacu­rau

Up until very recent­ly, on the rare occa­sion a Brazil­ian film became pop­u­lar out­side of the coun­try, it seemed to cater to a spe­cif­ic type of first-world fan­ta­sy – often one of Brazil as a hyper­sex­u­alised free-for-all land where peo­ple gun each oth­er down mer­ci­less­ly. A type of dehu­man­is­ing con­tent most for­eign view­ers could hap­pi­ly dis­tance them­selves from. With Kléber Mendonça Fil­ho and Juliano Dor­nelles’ Bacu­rau, that is no longer the case.

Set in a semi-dis­tant future, in a small city in the mid­dle of the North­east called Bacu­rau, the film begins with the death of Dona Carmeli­ta, a spir­i­tu­al matri­arch. As the city grieves, a nefar­i­ous plan is slow­ly com­ing to fruition – it starts with the city sud­den­ly dis­ap­pear­ing off Google Maps.

Then the already scarce water sup­ply is sab­o­taged, fol­lowed by com­plete inter­net out­age. The cul­prits, we dis­cov­er, are Amer­i­cans, look­ing to ful­fil a man-hunt fan­ta­sy, enabled by the town’s cor­rupt may­or and two Brazil­ians from South­ern cities. How­ev­er, things do not go accord­ing to plan. Cue the bloodshed.

Much of Bacurau’s nar­ra­tive might appear to fol­low that of a stan­dard revenge fan­ta­sy flick. But, to reduce the film a sim­ple expres­sion of hor­rif­ic vio­lence to this would be to under­es­ti­mate its com­plex­i­ty. The film is, with all its tropes and tri­umphs, an intri­cate por­trait of Brazil­ian soci­ety and all the con­tra­dic­tions that exist with­in it.

Explic­it and bloody ret­ribu­tive jus­tice from a com­mu­ni­ty that has been wronged by just about every author­i­ty there is appears to dri­ve the plot, but thrum­ming just below the sur­face is a cen­tral theme: arrogance.

It is arro­gance that made the pair of Brazil­ians from São Paulo and Rio con­sid­er them­selves, in their own per­ceived ​“Euro­pean-ness”, bet­ter than the inhab­i­tants of a tiny town in the rur­al North­west. It is arro­gance that brought the Eng­lish-speak­ing hunters to Bacu­rau, that made them believe that advanced tech­nol­o­gy enti­tled them to mur­der, and that stopped them from going into the city’s small muse­um (despite many an invi­ta­tion by the cit­i­zens) and see­ing the bat­tling her­itage and arse­nal kept with­in its walls.

So much of Bacu­rau com­bines a sense of sur­re­al­ism with icons famil­iar to most Brazil­ians – the old man teas­ing­ly com­pos­ing a song as he wan­ders along, the glar­ing inequal­i­ty, the sense of com­mu­ni­ty that comes from col­lec­tive sur­vival. Our cul­ture is many cul­tures at once, and Mendonça Fil­ho and Dor­nelles suc­ceed in cap­tur­ing sev­er­al of them, between fake UFOs, poet­ry and hal­lu­cino­genic drugs.

This sense of ​“famil­iar­i­ty” is per­fect­ly embod­ied in Sil­vero Pereira’s char­ac­ter Lun­ga who, in all his androg­y­ny and blood­lust, is a direct ref­er­ence to the North­east­ern can­ga­ceiros – 19^th cen­tu­ry ban­dits (or heroes, depend­ing on who you ask), who were decap­i­tat­ed by the police and whose heads were left to pub­licly decom­pose at the stairs of the pre­fec­ture for days.

The pho­tos of the can­ga­ceiros’ dead bod­ies were print­ed in the papers with much pride back in 1938. In 2020-some­thing, Lun­ga is now the one wield­ing a machete.