Bye Bye Brazil (Bye Bye Brasil)

(Left to right), Actor José Wilker, Betty Faria, Fábio Júnior, and director Carlos Diegues

Actor José Wilker in Rio de Janeiro

BYE BYE BRAZIL (Bye Bye Brasil)           A-                   

Brazil  France  Argentina  (110 mi)  1980 d:  Carlos Diegues

To the Brazilian people of the 21st Century

―title card at the end of the final credits

A tragi-comic road movie that literally goes in search of the Brazilian soul in this episodic quest for national identity, traveling some 9000 miles across a vast everchanging landscape into the heart of the Amazon, using a near documentary style of social realism mixed with flourishes of blatant theatricality in the form of Caravana Rolidei (Circus Holiday), a traveling circus group that scours the backwater towns in search of an audience, only to be thwarted by progress, as the national past time is watching TV, with viewers glued to the sets, disinterested in anything this road show can offer.  The overly flamboyant leader of the troupe is illusionist and “King of Dreams” Lord Cigano, José Wilker from Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands (Doña Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) (1976) playing another larger-than-life yet morally dubious role, basically a swindler and scam artist in search of an easy mark, joined by his precocious lover Salomé (Betty Faria), an exotic rhumba dancer who’s not afraid to step into the back room for a price, and deaf-mute Andorinha, aka Swallow (Príncipe Nabor), a black indigenous strong man and human flamethrower who also brings in wads of cash from high stakes arm-wrestling wagers (whose silence may reflect how the indigenous have been omitted from history).  The show is distinguished by a colorfully decorated truck that announces its arrival by loudspeaker, with master of ceremony Lord Cigano, outrageously dressed in a cape with clothes the color of the Brazilian flag, his face caked with make-up, resorting to exaggerated bravado and flowery language in describing what secrets are in store, always advertised as the greatest or most spectacular, yet in truth it’s a flimsy act barely worth one’s trouble, which is why they have to go deeper and deeper into the hinterlands to find places that buy into all the hyperbole.  The story becomes more about the people themselves, both the performers and the world at large, as it’s a beguiling and strangely compelling exposé of the slow transition into modernization, highlighted by the construction of the tree-lined Trans-Amazonian Highway that cuts through the heart of the rainforest and jungle, an ambitious project that connected the Northeast, the North, and the Central Plateau, previously isolated regions, each with their own cultural identities.  This roadway connection is an attempt to unify the country, but it comes at a price, as it’s massively expensive and destroys much of the natural world, literally plundering the resources from the rainforests, including lumber and mining development, causing pollution and water contamination, literally driving indigenous groups out of the forests, sending them into the cities where little opportunity awaits them, as companies either refuse to hire them or pay significantly less wages, a holdover of centuries of discrimination.  Additionally, government social services are unable to keep up with the population flow streaming into the cities looking for work, offering neighborhood slums for new arrivals in contrast to sleek modern skyscrapers.

Opening on the banks of the São Francisco River, we see river transport as the primary means of travel, a connection to the past, featuring a small traditional village with colonial architecture, street vendors selling herbs and various handicrafts, with folk music playing in the background.  Witnessing the performance is a peasant farmer and youthful accordionist Ciço (Fábio Júnior), grown weary of tilling the family’s barren lands, dreaming of faraway places with hopes of viewing the sea, along with his pregnant wife Dasdô (Zaira Zambelli), who barely utters a word in the entire film, yet has a profound effect, as her understated innocence and untainted vulnerability are the heart of the film, the only one without a motive, observing without making judgment, yet enduring it all, eventually bearing a child, ushering in a new future.  As the Caravana is leaving town, Ciço begs to come along, claiming he can play music, breaking into an invigorating tune, but they leave without him, only to back up and bring them along, with his accordion music playing as they head down the highway, initially to the sea, satisfying one of Ciço’s dreams, before cutting through the tropics in search of less developed regions outside the reach of advancing progress.  The seedy theatrical troupe recalls Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel (Gycklarnas afton) (1953), also bearing some resemblance to the traveling artists in Fellini’s LA STRADA (1954), where a more innocent Gelsomina is forced to contend with brutally crude strongman Zampanó, yet in each this life on the road was a means to escape the entrenched exploitation of the poor, offering a chance at something better, even if they barely made ends meet.  Much of what these films encapsulate is a dream for a better future, an attempt to overcome the dire impoverished circumstances of the past.  Diegues has a talent for the gritty realism of roadside photojournalism, adding a layer of complexity, capturing the melancholy uniqueness of each small village, exposing rural poverty and the inescapable reality of underdevelopment, carrying goods by ox cart, including the belongings of desperate people on the side of the road, as the stark imagery from cinematographer Lauro Escorel is as expressive in intimate moments as the sweeping jungle landscapes, becoming our visual guide through the journey.  Following shortly after the magnificent Wim Wenders film, Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit) Road Trilogy Pt. 3 (1976), there’s a curious American influence to both films, not just musically but in the presence of pinball machines in the jungle, or an indigenous family sipping coca cola, wearing designer jeans, eating ice-cream for the first time or listening to transistor radios, where their dream is to fly in an airplane.  While imagery may be what’s most remarkable about the film, they are accompanied by Chico Buarque’s uplifting soundtrack.

Featuring the contradictions brought on by globalization, with incomplete transitional stages in effect, where backwater squalor is set against a teeming urban metropolis, offering absurdly funny yet also bleakly sad reflections on the cultural impact felt across the nation.  The film reflects the changing culture of the country as it was making its transformation from military rule to a democratic government, as a rural-based society was heading towards rapid industrialization and urban migration.  Large-scale road development stimulated improved mass communication, particularly television, where broadcasting to all Brazilians was becoming possible.  With a remote interior village of Altamira advertised as a promised land, supposedly with food and wealth for everyone, a literal paradise on earth, they are surprised to discover it’s just another dusty village, a site where multi-national mining corporations are recruiting workers, flying them to remote locations where they’ll no doubt live in shabby conditions owned by the company, basically fleecing them with promises that never come, likely stuck in unimaginable filth and poverty, subjected to hazardous working conditions.  Dasdô delivers her baby out in the middle of an endless jungle, a baby girl, prompting Salomé to suggest it’s time for them to go, but Ciço is smitten by the exotic sensuality of Salomé, wanting to run away with her instead, but she sticks with Cigano, loyal to a fault.  Nevertheless, this tug of war of divergent interests keeps things interesting, with something unexpected always waiting in store for them, finding it more and more difficult to earn money, becoming destitute along the way, losing everything, forced into desperate straits, where they scatter like the winds.  Ciço and Dasdô make their way to Brasília, becoming part of a musical band in the local disco as the years pass, with mother and daughter on the triangles, doing backland variations of Bee-Gees songs, apparently doing fairly well for themselves when Ciço hears the familiar sounds of the truck loudspeakers promising an enchanted show.  Outside, a thoroughly modernized version of the Caravana Rolidey (now with a spelling correction) awaits, updated with dancing girls, a light show, and the crass commercialization of Frank Sinatra singing on cue, Frank Sinatra - Brazil (1958) - YouTube (2:55), with obscene sexual images painted onto the sides of the bus, led by the same enchanted duo of Lord Cigano and Salomé, suggesting sex never goes out of style.  Despite the allure of getting the band back together again, Ciço defers, liking the way things are, no longer searching for that elusive dream that never comes.  As the neon-lit bus heads down the road in pitch blackness, Cigano claps his hands and conjures up a morning sunshine, like Prospero in The Tempest, suggesting there’s something inherently magical about being Brazilian after all. 

2015 Top Ten List #8 Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente)

EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT (El abrazo de la serpiente)            A-                 
Colombia  Venezuela  Argentina  (125 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Crio Guerra    Official site    

Winner of the CICAE award at Cannes, which promotes art cinema, this surprisingly haunting period film, shot in black and white, with a brief expanse into color near the end, is not nearly as inventive or fantastical as Miguel Gomes’s 2013 Top Ten List #4 Tabu (2012), though it exists in an entirely different universe, offering a unique vantage point of those historically connected to Amazon rain forests and the indigenous population residing there.  The film is a road map for a journey into the past, exposing the brutal effects of colonialism imposed upon an indigenous population in Colombia, including the aftereffects of centuries of barbaric atrocities, slave labor, forced religious conversions, an elimination of their native languages, all highlighting the mammoth differences in cultural perspective between whites and local natives, as whites have plundered the rain forests in search of rubber and annihilated all but the last traces of an indigenous population, where the surviving native tribes no longer trust white people, having learned from personal experience that scheming whites are the lowest scourge of the earth.  The idea of profiting off the natural treasures found growing in the rain forest seems preposterous to the native people, who have for centuries developed a reverence for the sacred and curative powers of natural plants, such as the prized yakruna flower with alleged healing powers that whites wish to harvest in order to extract the purest rubber, where all whites see in the flower are dollar signs.  Even as these explorers hide their real intentions of what they plan to do with this plant if they find it, their writings about their expeditions provide the only window into this lost world.  What distinguishes this film is its ability to frame so much of the narrative around a non-white cultural perspective, holding a mirror up to Western civilization’s pattern of abuses in the region, offering a scintillatingly refreshing viewpoint that artistically evokes a curative solution for the hubris and arrogance that has perpetually guided outsiders into the region. 

Blending fact and fiction, the interconnected narrative follows a dual track thirty years apart, based upon the diaries of German ethnologist and explorer Theodor Koch-Grunberg in 1909, played by Jan Bijvoet from Borgman (2013), and another expedition that followed in his footsteps by American biologist and plant enthusiast Richard Evans Schultes in the 1940’s, played by Brionne Davis from AVENGED (2013), who had read Theo’s book, where each journey into the Amazon rain forest was in search of an elusive flower with amazing medicinal properties, where both men come in contact with the same medicine man or shaman, Karamakate, Niblio Torres in his youth and Antonio Bolivar as the older man, the last surviving member of his tribe in a region overrun by colonialists.  The blending of time adds a surreal quality to the film, where the slower pace of life along the river traversing by canoe through spectacular jungle foliage is already depicted in a lush, dreamlike atmosphere, beautifully shot by David Gallego, with an extraordinary sound design by Carlos García, enriched by the vivid sounds and sights of the flora and fauna, where as many as nine different languages are spoken along with native songs and ceremonial chants.  Wasting little time, the film gets right into the heart of the story, where a young Karamakate waits on a riverbank with a painted face in ceremonial attire, spear in hand, wearing only a loin cloth as a canoe approaches carrying a deathly-ill German scientist and a native companion Maduca (Yauenkü Migue) dressed in clothing worn by whites.  Asking if he would save his friend’s life, the shaman refuses, claiming it was the white man that destroyed his village and wiped out his entire tribe, where he’s all that’s left, showing an equal amount of contempt for both of them, telling them to go look elsewhere.  When Theo suggests there are survivors from his tribe and he knows where to find them, the irritated Karamakate reluctantly agrees to help, so long as they disturb nothing, while refusing to eat meat or fish and leaving the jungle intact.  Blowing a substance (likely a mixture of coca leaves) directly into his nose, Theo soon recovers, readily abiding by a new set of guidelines established by Karamakate, who must continually inject him with this curative medicine to avoid a relapse, as only the yakruna flower can provide a permanent cure. 

As they begin their Odysseus-like journey, the film possesses a near mythical quality as they encounter a series of unfortunate circumstances, deliberately entering Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where the making of the film itself recalls the impossible encounters of Herzog’s FITZCARRALDO (1982), or the madness of AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD (1972), continually mixing the future with the past, where the filmmaker literally alters any concept of time, as it’s all part of the same “experience,” where Karamakate informs them “Listen to what the river can tell you.  Every tree, every flower brings wisdom.”  For the shaman, this is also a journey of rediscovery, as his powers have grown rusty from disuse, identifying as a chullachaqui (an empty shell of a human being), allowing himself to be a part of the world again where he once again lives in harmony with all things.  He ridicules the useless pile of suitcases that Theo lugs along at every step, suggesting “they’re just things” weighing them down, throwing them overboard at one point, while Theo claims he is a man of science, where he has to provide evidence of where he’s been or no one back in Germany would believe him, showing him notebooks of drawings he has made, or specimens he has collected along the way, which includes taking Karamakate’s photograph standing proudly as the master of his domain.  This same photograph is used to guide Richard back into the same region decades later, as they retrace the same steps traveled on the earlier journey still in search of the elusive plant.  In a way, the narrative structure resembles Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), where an Indian leads a white man on a protracted journey of awakening just before the hour of his death, retracing their steps as they cross between several spiritual realms leading up to the “final crossing.”  As we see Theo socializing with a group of natives in their own language, where there is plenty of singing and dancing, he demonstrates the advanced power of a compass, which one of the natives takes to immediately, offering a handmade craft for its possession, which angers Theo, as it’s one of his most prized navigational tools, suggesting technology will alter their natural evolution, but Karamakate reminds him that blind ignorance is not some pure romanticized notion, “You cannot forbid them to learn. Knowledge belongs to all men.”

While there are many horrors seen along the way, perhaps the worst are the crimes perpetrated by the rubber industry, as they come across a grove of bleeding rubber trees, a reflection of the white presence in the Amazon, where Maduca angrily spills all the cups collecting the white sticky liquid released from gashes in the trunks of the trees, fuming over the Effects on indigenous population where the rubber barons viciously rounded up the local Indians by force, placed them in chains, killed them on the spot or cut off the arms of those that disobeyed, while ordering them to tap rubber out of the trees, where on one plantation alone that began with 50,000 Indians, only 8,000 remained after the harvest.  In some areas 90% of the Indian population was wiped out.  A distraught one-armed man they encounter is beside himself in grief at what they’ve done, knowing he will be held responsible, asking them to kill him right there on the spot, as he will surely not live to see another day.  Further down river they run into a deranged Spanish priest running a Catholic mission filled with orphaned native children who lost their parents to the rubber plantations, all dressed in white robes, where they are forbidden to speak in their native, or “pagan” language, including ancestral fables and stories, as any cultural reminders of where they came from is subject to brutal punishment, where the absurdity of the situation is so dire that the priest prefers to inflict the wrath of a public whipping even as the Colombian army approaches on a rampage through the countryside where in all likelihood they will eventually be slaughtered.  Besides a need to unburden themselves of material possessions, to explore the mystery of existence through consciousness alone, Karamakate reminds both scientists that they carry psychological baggage and cannot be cured of their illness because the white man has forgotten how to dream.  In spite of the sinister undercurrent, there’s a meditative quality to Guerra’s direction that culminates in a transformative final scene that transcends into a near-religious mystical experience, where the only way to heal is by learning how to dream, all emerging from their journeys as different men, as they are finally allowed to “experience” what they came in search of, literally exploding out of the subconscious like the final scenes of Tarkovsky’s ANDREI RUBLEV (1966), becoming a montage of brilliant, swirling colors, a hallucinogenic, dream-like vision revealing the magnificence of the cosmos, complete with animal gods and heavenly constellations, where the universe exists in all its abstract manifestations, pushing the boundaries of what is real and imagined, offering a poignant closing dedication to those “peoples whose song we will never know.”