Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019)

A relentlessly "interesting" film, Bacurau is a bit of a disappointment nevertheless. Mendonça's previous film, Aquarius, is one of my top films of the decade, so admittedly that would be a tough act to follow. And to the man's credit, he did not exactly attempt to follow that triumph so much as veer off in an entirely new direction. Bacurau is a Western of sorts, although it doesn't always seem like it. It is clearly a film that is concerned with genre, though, particularly the time-honored use of genre as a mode of political critique. 

It's also operating as a bit of a meta-commentary on how genre has been revived by arthouse directors in the past ten or fifteen years. Like certain Asian films -- key works by Bong Joon-ho or Takashi Miike, for example -- Bacurau begins in one mode and takes a hairpin turn with respect to plot and tone. We begin with the homecoming of a young woman, Teresa (Barbara Cohen), who left the small Northeastern village of Bacurau some time ago, presumably to study. The way to the village is littered with random coffins, a hint of something gone awry.

Bacurau is situated in the region known as the sertão, the Brazilian outback which has a lore comparable to America's Old West, and is sometimes denigrated as backwards compared to the nation's urbanized areas. At the start of the film, we learn that a crooked politician (Thardelly Lima) has dammed up an aqueduct in order to deprive Bacurau of water, presumably diverting it to a wealthier town. So before things get crazy, we know there is a movement underway to destroy Bacurau, led by moneyed interests.

[SPOILERS]

After some rather ridiculous bikers show up, Bacurau switches gears. We discover that a group of heavily armed, mostly American hunters, led by a German named Michael (Udo Kier), has cut off all cellular service to Bacurau, blocked the roads out of town, and even worked with authorities to have the village removed from official maps, so they can kill the locals for sport. What appeared to be a set-up for a more standard sort of peasant revolt has in fact jumped the track into The Most Dangerous Game.

Mendonça and Dornelles are obviously working in an allegorical mode. Otherwise, there wouldn't be much point to so much ugly bloodshed, or forcing the viewer to spend time with a group of such smug white supremacists, debating their point system, relativist ethics, and even screwing at one point. It is not insignificant that the pair of bikers, who serve as an advance team for the hunters, are urban Brazilians themselves, who erroneously think that the hunting team accept them as "white" equals.

So the Brazilian ruling class is helping imperialists destroy the nation's indigenous people and history from the inside, aligning itself with fascist interests on the mistaken assumption that there will be a place at the table for an ethnically cleansed, faux-European version of South America. But I don't know. In this scenario, Jair Bolsonaro and his clique are merely sad dupes, toadying up to the Trumps of the world. Granted, I am not Brazilian. But I feel as if this reading of contemporary geopolitics kind of lets Bolsonaro off the hook. He's not a petty tyrant, playing at being a dictator while the actual power lies elsewhere. Yes, Western imperialism is real, but so is the danger at home.