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A Febre do Cão Bravo (2023)
All This in Only 38 Minutes!
What do YOU really get done in only 38 minutes?
Eat at McDonald's? Space out driving to work? Struggle in bed to get from asleep to awake? Flip through hundreds of Instagram and TikTok screens? .... Got it: trivial and empty little flashes of time.
Or you can enjoy getting swept along with your emotions firing full volume by this ambitious, heated and unflinching short feature gem by Madeirense Luciano Moniz.
The wrenching loneliness here between the 5 members of a Madeira family will gnaw at you. That's because it will trigger flashbacks that you never like to deal with from your own personal variation of how these 5 everyday people suffer from the hollowness of never finding a way to connect with each other.
The film's creators describe it as a day-in-the-life portrayal of 20 hours of the communal loneliness inside a chaotic 5-person family. A family where everyday life is war. Where weapons are replaced by verbal violence.
Isaías Viveiros, playing the son Edger, has an easy and attractive screen manner. We see flashes of star quality and charisma, and smile at him wearing the T Shirt of the icon James Dean, who in some moments, he faintly mirrors.
Pedro Pisco as Diego also has a comfortable, convincing screen manner. It did seem, though, that as the enraged, bitter and nearly always drunk father, he keeps the pitch of his anger too high for too long over the first portion of the film. Even bad drunks have peaks and valleys of hideous behavior followed by despondency or quiet self-pity that modulates the level of their dialogue and behaviour. In the final scene Pisco does indeed show his breadth when he displays a more nuanced spectrum of tone, irony and volume.
The very smartly done set design also beams out signals. The color rich jumble of shapes and textures of the pig pen father's apartment looks heavily lived-in, but screams "Out of Control''. Then you get a smack-in-the-face contrast when the action shifts to the sterile, white and rectilinear aparment of the recently separated wife, Vanda, played by Sandra Cardoso, and her two daughters. Carolina Andrade is Diana, who only dreams of escaping the hell of her family life. Maria Verga as Ariana, tries to reach out to her sister, but they have almost nothing in common. Ariana has one of the rare moments in this family of a happy look when her father appears. But it turns out he's only there to spite and scream at his wife, not share "quality time" with his daughter. And you'll never look at a cooked chicken again the same way after you see Sandra Cardoso tear into making lunch from it.
The hollow, white, cold apartment is a perfect surrounding for nonexistent love and failure to connect. Diana and Ariana shuffle around in it like ghosts or robots, lifeless and drained of rewarding human emotions, overwhelmed by anger and disappointment. Director of Photography Andre Moniz Vieira captures the estranged family's quarters beautifully. He also creates a haunting, swirling, pastoral picnic scene that hints at what may be a real, or perhaps only imagined, short truce between the torn-apart warring family.
The 6th family member, the dog of the title, is a mostly symbolic, invisible character. But even he finally gets to show that he is just as disgusted as the others with the never-ending dysfunction where nothing is ever resolved. He is an almost entirely offscreen star, yet still features by proxy in memorable and evocative scenes of a full & untouched food bowl and an empty collar and chain.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill: "If you want me to speak for two minutes, it will take me three weeks of preparation ... If you want me to speak for an hour, I am ready now."
Making a powerful short feature demands great skill, huge amounts of work and a special magic. Yet here we have an unflinching personal cry out to all of us to pay attention to, and start making the changes to cure the pandemic of isolation and loneliness we can all see is beginning to erode the foundations of family and society. And all this in only 38 minutes. Take a bow, team!!