Movies I Watched - March 2026 "Life and Death in the Badlands"
All of these were part of the Super Saturday Movie Club, whose monthly theme this time was "Brazilian Westerns".
Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol [Black God, White Devil] (1964)
I genuinely came in expecting a slow, artsy, meditative experience with concrete-art-like nonsensical monologues about stuff you can't quite make out, with a lot of loose words thrown around with not a lot of rhyme or reason. Instead, I was served a delicious meal of rich metaphors, energetic acting, killer shots, and such strong art direction that I was honestly at a loss for words. No one had ever told me this was, in broad terms, a historical movie, following pretty closely the story of Corisco, widely believed to be the last cangaceiro. A massive tour the force that rightly raised the bar for the entire Cinema Novo movement. 10/10.
O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro [Antonio das Mortes] (1969)
Same director, similar story, just five years apart, but this one is way more ambitious and unconventional. The picture incarnates metaphors and literary images in a way I had never actually seen done in Brazilian movies, making it all feel deeply oneiric and "unstuck". The cinematography is on point, the vibes are immaculate, but I do feel like Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol had a certain something else that this one didn't. The main character felt more human, whereas Antônio das Mortes feels like a Ford cowboy, and that slight dip in focus makes a difference. Nevertheless, an incredible picture. 9/10.
Cabra Marcado para Morrer [Twenty Years Later] (1984)
I first watched this movie on Monday, September 26, 2022, and then as now I found it deeply moving. It's a careful, personal portrait of the naked brutality of the Dictatorship and how it broke the people under its hooves, but it's also a snapshot of the optimism of the time of the end of the Dictatorship. Brasil lends itself easily to political nihilism, or at least it does since 2013, so watching someone who sounds like my grandparents talking about how the fight cannot stop, how the same necessities of 1964, which were the same necessities of 1925, and the same necessities of 1889, they are still there. The woman who serves as the centerpiece for this movie, Elizabeth Teixeira, is still alive somewhere out there, she is from about the same generation as my great grandparents, who were also rural people. It resonates in my soul. 10/10.
"The fight is what cannot end. The same necessities of 64 are planted, it didn't budge a milimetre. The same necessity is in the phisionomy of the proletarian, of the peasant, and of the student. The fight is what cannot stop. While it is said that there is hunger and misery, the People has to fight. Who can say he won't fight for better days? We must fight. He who has the means, who has his good life, let him stay away. While I, as I suffer, I have to fight and I have the chest to say: it is necessary to change the regime, it is necessary that the People fight. While this little regime is still there, this little democracy... a "democracy" without freedom, a democracy with miserly salaries, with hunger, without the son of the workman and the peasant having the right to study oh... no, it cannot be."
Bacurau (2019)
A rewatch, as I had watched this for the first time on Sunday, March the 1st, 2020, very early on my film-viewing career. I liked it slightly less in hindsight; it tries to do quite a lot at once and doesn't really pull it off very well. Plenty of ideas are thrown around and then left behind, things which ought to have been expanded are left implied, and the shots are just not very inspiring. The decision to film the shootout in broad daylight when the lighting at night in the digital cameras looked so much better is completely incomprehensible to me.
Also, it feels phony. None of the villagers are bad people or unapproving of certain things which Brazilian peasants absolutely would, such as the prostitutes, the capoeira dancing out in the open, the interest in the local museum, the taking of psychotropics, the botanist who walks around naked, etc. It's a gaze that feels exoticising. It paints a picture that, if left to their own devices, the community would thrive perfectly and without a hitch. Except we know that the director does not come from there; he's a graduate in journalism from the big city, married to a French woman. HE is one of the foreigners that the movie mocks too, yet it doesn't quite feel like he understands this.
