Movie Review: Bacurau

Bacurau **** / *****

Directed by: Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles.

Written by: Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho.

Starring: Udo Kier (Michael), Sônia Braga (Domingas), Karine Teles (Forasteira), Barbara Colen (Teresa), Chris Doubek (Willy), Alli Willow (Kate), Jonny Mars (Terry), Julia Marie Peterson (Julia), Brian Townes (Joshua), Thomas Aquino (Pacote), Antonio Saboia (Forasteiro), Silvero Pereira (Lunga), Edilson Silva (Robson), Wilson Rabelo (Plinio), James Turpin (Jake), Thardelly Lima (Tony Jr), Luciana Souza (Isa), Lia de Itamaracá (Carmelita), Suzy Lopes (Luciene), Clebia Sousa (Angela), Uirá dos Reis (Raolino), Rubens Santos (Erivaldo), Black Jr. (DJ Urso), Danny Barbosa (Darlene), Charles Hodges (Bob), Buda Lira (Claudio), Zoraide Coleto (Madame), Márcio Fecher (Flavio), Ingrid Trigueiro (Deisy), Valmir do Côco (Bidé), Fabiola Liper (Nelinha), Rodger Rogério (Carranca), Eduarda Samara (Madalena), Val Junior (Maciel), Jamila Facury (Sandra), Carlos Francisco (Damiano).

 

There is something off about Bacurau right from the start of the movie – but you only gradually come to realize what it is. The film is set in a small, isolated rural community in Brazil, and is set, as it says, sometime in the near future. The film opens with a doctor, Teresa (Barbara Colen), returning to her hometown of Bacurau, presumably to attend the funeral of her grandmother – but also to deliver medical supplies. For a while, the film feels like it is going to be a sprawling portrait of this community – and the eccentrics who reside in it – like Domingas (Sonia Braga), the local doctor, who gets drunk before the funeral, and says some inappropriate things. And for a while, that is just what Bacurau is. Then the film slowly starts adding in new layers – the corrupt mayor who comes to town, and is clearly hated (rightfully so) – as Bacurau has become a dry wasteland because of a dam the mayor approved – and even his outreach efforts of food aren’t really that appreciated, because the food is expired. He’s there to exploit the people and the land – made explicit when he leaves town with one of the towns young prostitutes. And then Udo Kier as a German-American businessman shows up – and if there’s one thing you never want to happen in a movie you’re in, it’s to have Udo Kier show up. Things are not going to go well after that.

 

div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"> Bacurau, which was directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (Neighboring Sounds, Aquarius) and his normal production designer Juliano Dornelles, contains wild shifts of tone and genre throughout. I’m sure you could complain about the inconsistency, but that would also mean you would be complaining about the fun. The film owes a huge debt to John Carpenter in terms of it style as it moves along, and becomes a genre film – and those other types of films of the 1970s and 1980s. It’s also perhaps the film Eli Roth he was making (twice) with the Hostel films, and failing miserably both times. And yet, strangely, it’s still a film that you can see the filmmaker behind Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius in – he’s just turned up the genre heat this time around.

 

And the filmmakers are smart about how they do transition things. It isn’t as simple as to say the film starts as an ethnographic film about this community, then turns into a brutally violent revisionist Western. Things are off from the start – the coffins that Teresa and the driver have to dodge on their way to town, the drug she is given as soon as she gets there. It’s just that the genre elements gather more and more as the film moves along – first with the introduction of a UFO shaped drone, accompanying a couple of brightly dressed bikers, who say they are tourists from Sao Paolo. And then, shortly, as the American characters are introduced. These Americans may be the films weak point – they are one note to be sure, the ugliest of Ugly Americans, and yet in Trump’s America, they don’t seem all that much like caricatures. They are as privileged as they can get, and don’t bother to see anyone else as human – one even going so far as to earnestly ask for help for someone she just tried to kill.

 

Like Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, the film is about the fight between the past and the future – between those who want to hold on, and those who want to bulldoze over top of them. This time though, the fight is very literal. And that fight gets brutal and bloody – and of course, hugely entertaining. Yet Bacurau never loses site of the cost of this fight either. The film works as well as it does because even if the American invaders are one note, the villagers of Bacurau are not – and the film has a real sense of community, and rallying together. It needed those early scenes. It makes everything that happens later hit all that much harder in this warped, bloody, entertaining, disturbing genre fusion.