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The MFA’s Brazilian Film Festival runs hot and cold
BY PETER KEOUGH
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"The Brazilian Film and Music Festival"
At the Museum of Fine Arts March 4 through 13.
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Until recently, Brazilian cinema had last made a stir in the late ’70s and early ’80s with saucy sex comedies like Bruno Barreto’s 1978 Dona Flor e seus dois maridos/Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (the Y tu mamá también of its time?) and sensational slum exposés like Hector Babenco’s 1981 Pixote. Perhaps it was the language that marginalized the industry for such a long period; perhaps that’s also why Portugal’s Manoel de Oliveira is one of the world’s least-known great filmmakers. Or perhaps it’s that television is even more pervasive and addictive (the soap operas, especially) there than it is in the US. In recent years, though, Brazil has shown signs of a screen comeback. Walter Calles’s sentimental Central do Brasil/Central Station won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1998, and Fernando Meirelles was a surprise Best Director nominee this year for his Cidade de Deus/City of God. Also released this past year, Felipe Lacerda & José Padilha’s punishing Ônibus 174/Bus 174, a documentary about an attempted bus robbery that deteriorates into a televised hostage crisis, has gotten a lot of critical acclaim. It’s a good time, then, for the MFA to present a Brazilian Film and Music Festival (that the museum has to throw in the music suggests a lack of confidence in the films), and the current batch even includes an early effort by Meirelles (co-directed by Nando Olival) that has an attempted bus robbery as a key scene. The resolution of that scene is a lot sunnier than the grim, inevitable conclusion to Ônibus 174, and what characterizes Domésticas (2001; 90 minutes; March 6 at 12:30 p.m.) is a lot more upbeat than the jazzed-up squalor and brutality of Cidade de Deus. A coterie of São Paulo maids live lives of colorful desperation as they clean, search for love, search for missing children, and look for better jobs (Roxanne applies for a "modeling" position and is slow to recognize the true nature of the job), but the actresses break free of Meirelles’s slickly edited and shot artifice to deliver black-and-white soliloquies on their hopes and dreams and discontents. Domésticas partakes of both the ribald spirit of the sex-comedy tradition and the muckraking inclinations of the naturalist Pixote school, but it’s toned down for general audiences. Hardly subversive, it’s always entertaining, and though they aren’t exactly feminist role models, these domestics are inspiring in their own modest way. The trio in Aluisio Abranches’s As três Marias/The Three Marias (2001; 90 minutes; March 4 at 6 p.m. and March 7 at 2 p.m.) don’t inspire much credibility, either as role models or as dramatic characters, but they are a lot of fun. In a mind-boggling opening montage, Dona Filomena jilts her old flame Don Firmino, and in short order Firmino and his two boys hang Filomena’s husband by his own entrails, set one of her sons on fire, and gouge out the eyes and heart of the other. Where can you go from there? Filomena sends her three daughters, each named Maria, out to seduce a different hit man to avenge the crimes. Never send a man out to do a woman’s job is the film’s moral, and it’s spelled out in a twist ending reminiscent of Foxy Brown via The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Style-addled to the point of unintentional hilarity, this hyperbolic fluff doesn’t have a dull moment. The same goes for Cláudio Assis’s Amarelo manga/Mango Yellow (2002; 102 minutes; March 4 at 8 p.m., March 6 at 2:15 p.m., and March 13 at 3:45 p.m.), the best of the bunch and a film that allows me to write a sentence like, "After biting off her husband’s mistress’s ear, the formerly prim, evangelical Kika goes home with Isaac the body snatcher and shoves a hair brush up his ass." Needless to say, Amarelo Manga is original and outrageous and a little bit out of its mind. Think of it as Pixote times Dona Flor squared, with David Lynch lurking just out of the frame. A bunch of colorful low-lifes hang around, squabble, and screw one another over in the Texas Hotel and the Avenida Bar in the worst part of the city of Recife, and the color they all eventually take on is that of the title. Assis doesn’t really follow a linear narrative; like Krzysztof Kieslowski in his Tricolor Trilogy, he riffs on his chosen hue, yellow coloring such disparate items as the barmaid’s pubic hair, the skin of a ripening corpse, and Isaac’s vintage Mercedes. Amarelo manga makes a strong case that the Brazilian cinema will once again bear fruit.
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