Neigh­bour­ing Sounds

In his lin­er-notes to the DVD release of Jacques Demy’s Les Demoi­selles De Rochefort, Amer­i­can crit­ic Jonathan Rosen­baum talked about ​‘jazz movies’. These are not movies about or which con­tain jazz music (even though they some­times do), but movies which adopt a struc­ture based on pat­terns, motifs, moods, vari­a­tions and digres­sions which char­ac­terise the form.

Kle­ber Men­donça Filho’s extra­or­di­nary debut fea­ture Neigh­bour­ing Sounds could be described as a ​‘jazz movie’ in that it insou­ciant­ly rejects cosy lin­ear­i­ty in order to peruse its cen­tral theme of urban alien­ation in var­i­ous excit­ing, inno­v­a­tive and unex­pect­ed ways. It’s a dis­ori­ent­ing, pas­tel-hued city sym­pho­ny, played in an insid­i­ous­ly dis­may­ing register.

Set in and around an apart­ment block in the famous­ly afflu­ent Brazil­ian town of Recife, Neigh­bour­ing Sounds has no real plot to speak of. Only the threat of plot. Filho’s brac­ing­ly prag­mat­ic design sees trou­bled fam­i­lies mud­dling through life, major rev­e­la­tions occur­ring off-cam­era, mel­liflu­ous steadicams coax­ing us down blind alleys and a series of por­ten­tous hap­pen­ings all appear­ing to sig­nal some kind of full soci­etal meltdown.

The sound design blips and pops and offers a con­stant sub-son­ic burr which sug­gests very bad things are about to go down. And they do, but not in the way you’d expect them to. In its bru­tal ded­i­ca­tion to nur­tur­ing a sense of omi­nous threat, this com­bustible dra­ma owes a sol­id debt to the likes of John Car­pen­ter, Michael Haneke and David Lynch, even if, for­mal­ly, it feels like it’s styled on Jacques Tati’s mean­der­ing met­ro­pol­i­tan opus Playtime.

The Tati com­par­i­son car­ries over into Filho’s total dom­i­na­tion of the image, not mere­ly the steely metic­u­lous­ness of how shots are framed, but how peo­ple and objects move with­in them. At points it even tips over into closed cir­cuit voyeurism, as if the human char­ac­ters are being sub­sumed by their surroundings.

There’s an inquir­ing social con­scious­ness at the heart of Neigh­bour­ing Sounds and indi­vid­ual episodes address issues such as gen­er­a­tional habits, class rival­ry, pet­ty jeal­ousies and the impos­si­bil­i­ty of attain­ing a lev­el of com­pre­hen­sive secu­ri­ty. One shot fol­lows a car as it swerves down a road at night. It halts to a stop and there are a cou­ple of excru­ci­at­ing beats that allow us to form an expla­na­tion for this hap­pen­ing. The sug­ges­tion is that the cou­ple in the car are fight­ing, but as with near­ly every moment like this in the film, Fil­ho has oth­er ideas.

And, admit­ted­ly, the rug-pulling does start to feel a lit­tle aca­d­e­m­ic by the time you’re on the home stretch, espe­cial­ly the hyper-abrupt end­ing which cuts you off at the exact point where the film’s juici­est plot­line is intro­duced. Still, major kudos to Fil­ho for build­ing a gigan­tic con­crete movi­escape in which the bustling, intense rhythms of dai­ly life are set to a strange, strange new beat.