This is a great review, thanks for writing it. I am somewhat surprised that foreign reviewers don't seem to be bothered by the last 20 minutes of the movie, which I found to be too laudatory and melodramatic, especially the (only) scene featuring Fernanda Montenegro.
Besides your book - which I read and loved but is in a storage box somewhere that I can't access - do you have recs for what to read in English about this history? Or really any history of S. American dictatorships and the US connection?
Thank you for this review. I look forward to seeing the movie. Brazil has some great directors, actors, and films. I know you mentioned you do not care about acting, but if you liked the principle actors in the film, may I humbly suggest you watch Fernanda Torres in "Casa de Areia" (with Fernanda Montenegro also playing her mother), "Terra Estrangeira", and the more popular "O Que é Isso, Companheiro?"? Selton Mello was great in " LavourArcaica" and "Erva do Rato", and he directed (and starred in) a couple of touching films, "O Filme da Minha Vida" and "O Palhaço". I also really enjoyed Fernanda Montenegro's performances in the Léon Hirszman films, "Eles Não Usam Black-Tie" and "A Falecida".
I got the chance to see this in Denver recently and was pleasantly surprised by the size of the crowd in the theater! I'm so happy about the film's success. Some of the edges did feel smoother than they should be, but that didn't diminish its emotional power. Fernanda Torres moved me to tears more than once, what a great performance.
Great review and appreciate the additional background and context. Your review also helped to give me a little extra motivation to see the film. In 2022 I saw another film "Argentina, 1985", which I thought was a well intentioned film about an important subject covering roughly the same era. However, it kind of felt like the film missed the mark based on its reliance on court room drama cliches, and the Hollywood three act structure. My sense was that the story probably would have carried more emotional weight as a documentary. Salles' film on the other hand, keeps you off balance and gives a sense of the menace of the time and place. I am curious though if the film "plays" differently with different audiences in Brazil based on class position? e.g. does the fact that this happened to a relatively privileged family make the story less relatable to people from other backgrounds? Also, even though the film doesn't visually depict physical torture, I thought it gave some sense of the kind of trauma that these practices have on its victims. It crossed my mind that this one family's experience probably has played out more than a million times in the context of the Cold War and the War on Terror (too often with the U.S.'s backing). One would hope that there would be universal agreement that forced disappearances and torture should never be permissible under any circumstances. Any "rules-based order" worth defending, would seem to need to encompass this very simple and fundamental principle.
This made me like me the movie a bit more, but I can’t help but feel like it’s the easiest way to depict a morbid subject like this. It might as well be a disaster movie the way the perpetrators of the tragedy get no exploration, the way theres barely any larger context to their violence, and how the films attention becomes primarily iconographical about the widow after the crisis is over. To be fair, I don’t know nearly enough about the subject to make any of my critiques meaningful, but it felt like one big empty platitude the entire time.
Thanks, I needed to read this today.
thanks Vincent I see it's playing in my part of the bay area so off we go to the flix this evening
This is a great review, thanks for writing it. I am somewhat surprised that foreign reviewers don't seem to be bothered by the last 20 minutes of the movie, which I found to be too laudatory and melodramatic, especially the (only) scene featuring Fernanda Montenegro.
Besides your book - which I read and loved but is in a storage box somewhere that I can't access - do you have recs for what to read in English about this history? Or really any history of S. American dictatorships and the US connection?
Thank you for this review. I look forward to seeing the movie. Brazil has some great directors, actors, and films. I know you mentioned you do not care about acting, but if you liked the principle actors in the film, may I humbly suggest you watch Fernanda Torres in "Casa de Areia" (with Fernanda Montenegro also playing her mother), "Terra Estrangeira", and the more popular "O Que é Isso, Companheiro?"? Selton Mello was great in " LavourArcaica" and "Erva do Rato", and he directed (and starred in) a couple of touching films, "O Filme da Minha Vida" and "O Palhaço". I also really enjoyed Fernanda Montenegro's performances in the Léon Hirszman films, "Eles Não Usam Black-Tie" and "A Falecida".
I got the chance to see this in Denver recently and was pleasantly surprised by the size of the crowd in the theater! I'm so happy about the film's success. Some of the edges did feel smoother than they should be, but that didn't diminish its emotional power. Fernanda Torres moved me to tears more than once, what a great performance.
Outstanding! 🇧🇷 Thanks!
I also really enjoyed the film but haven't dug into Brazil's recent history to connect that to this film. Great analysis!
Great review and appreciate the additional background and context. Your review also helped to give me a little extra motivation to see the film. In 2022 I saw another film "Argentina, 1985", which I thought was a well intentioned film about an important subject covering roughly the same era. However, it kind of felt like the film missed the mark based on its reliance on court room drama cliches, and the Hollywood three act structure. My sense was that the story probably would have carried more emotional weight as a documentary. Salles' film on the other hand, keeps you off balance and gives a sense of the menace of the time and place. I am curious though if the film "plays" differently with different audiences in Brazil based on class position? e.g. does the fact that this happened to a relatively privileged family make the story less relatable to people from other backgrounds? Also, even though the film doesn't visually depict physical torture, I thought it gave some sense of the kind of trauma that these practices have on its victims. It crossed my mind that this one family's experience probably has played out more than a million times in the context of the Cold War and the War on Terror (too often with the U.S.'s backing). One would hope that there would be universal agreement that forced disappearances and torture should never be permissible under any circumstances. Any "rules-based order" worth defending, would seem to need to encompass this very simple and fundamental principle.
This made me like me the movie a bit more, but I can’t help but feel like it’s the easiest way to depict a morbid subject like this. It might as well be a disaster movie the way the perpetrators of the tragedy get no exploration, the way theres barely any larger context to their violence, and how the films attention becomes primarily iconographical about the widow after the crisis is over. To be fair, I don’t know nearly enough about the subject to make any of my critiques meaningful, but it felt like one big empty platitude the entire time.
Hang in