Cannes film festival
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s study of a man attempting to escape corrupt politics is a tremendous, novelistic study of corruption in high and low places
Director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s new film is set in the Brazilian dictatorship of the 1970s and its visual brilliance, sensual big-city intrigue, shaggy-dog comedy, gruesome lowlife walk-ons and epically languorous mystery combine to create something special. It’s about the everyday nastiness of political tyranny, high- and low-level, and with its subject matter and present-day perspective, could be compared with Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here. Yet this is more ambitious, more totally complex and elusive. As the movie progressed, I found myself comparing it to Sergio Leone, to Antonioni’s The Passenger in its unhurried progress to some terrible violent denouement, to Elmore Leonard via Quentin Tarantino, to Meirelles and Lund’s City of God and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.
Wagner Moura plays Marcelo, a man on the run, or preparing to go on the run, driving across the country in a vivid yellow VW Beetle, which irritates the local corrupt cops. He is a widower with a small boy currently being looked after by his late wife’s parents; his father-in-law runs a cinema showing, among other things, Jean-Paul Belmondo in Le Magnifique, the trailer calling him “the Secret Agent”. Marcelo is not exactly a dissident, not precisely a political agitator or really even a leftist, but he does now find it necessary to get out of Brazil with his son. Yet things are not that easy. In a previous life, Marcelo was an a academic working in engineering who found that a minister with private commercial connections was ready to shut down his university department and transfer all its research, with its lucrative industry potential, to a private company in which the minister owned shares. The resulting quarrel results in the minister hiring a couple of gargoyle hitmen, moonlighting from their secret police duties, to whack Marcelo.
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