5/10
They tried to make a Bolsonaro dystopia in Brazil, but the film fails
7 May 2024
The movie intended to be a dystopian fable of Bolsonaro's Brazil with its militarism, fake patriotic defense, widespread charismatic Christianity, and impoverishment of people. However, the excessive long length and terrible pace make it a failure, and the script tries many things without reaching any cohesion. There is the intention of putting peripheric (and formerly in jail) lesbian black women as protagonists in a naturalistic aesthetics such as the recurrent one in films from Contagem, but the script is bad and the references are fragrant and not sophisticated. The grimy aesthetics in a slum in Ceilândia (near Brasília) in the very beginning seemed promising but soon the terrible pace became an obvious constraint. The first 14 minutes could have been two! Together with a lack of events, there is a boring testimony in a documentary style in order to compensate the impossibility of understanding what is going on simply by watching the scenes. After the title of the movie appears, situation does not change for nearly one hour and a half. Almost nothing happen, and pace is sluggish as hell. There are many boring or annoying scenes intending to show that atmosphere, but they are often too long (and recurrently with long bad music). The most remarkable was the bizarre 8-minute charismatic worship ceremony scene, a penalty I believe that spectator did not deserve. The supposedly main plot of the former convict women who composed a gang of oil theft and smuggling is very badly connected with the elections, in which one of the characters is a candidate of fictional Party of the Arrested People, with a platform with many issues directed toward the rights of the poor people. Only when one hour and a half length is over, the references to Bolsonaro's Brazil appear, including explicit mentions to him, in the mouths and T-shirts of his (in the film, always white) supporters. In the radio, it is mentioned (with bad sound) that the regime opposed "criminals and subversives", like in military dictatorship. Policemen use Bolsonaro's slogan as theirs; nothing is subtle in the movie. We also see that the women gang becomes increasingly partner of motorcycle delivery men, who suffer with job insecurity of (also a core issue in nowadays world). Uninteresting naturalistic long dialogues (on lesbian sexuality, life in jail, dysfunctional family background, and so forth), emulating a documentary, occupy a long fraction of the movie throughout it, contributing for its tediousness. To resume, this movie with more than 2 hours and a half length would work better if it were not only shorter, but actually a short film. There is too much time for too little to show. The long dialogues of women who look like belonging to the poor people do not make the film be truer or deeper.
0 out of 0 found this helpful. Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink

Recently Viewed