Friendly Beast + Luz
Friendly Beast (*****, Brazil, Dir: Gabriela Amaral) and Luz (*****, Germany, Dir: Tilman Singer) were by far the standouts of the festival, both coming away with two awards each – Best Performance for Luciana Paes and Best Director, Best Cinematography and Best Film respectively.
Friendly Beast, set in a middle-class restaurant in Sao Paolo is a searing indictment of the current mentality of Brazilian politics. Two robbers attempt to hold up the restaurant, but the tables are turned when Inacio, the narcissistic owner, shoots one of the robbers, before deciding to take matters into his own hands and locking up everyone – the diners, the robbers, the cook, and the waitress – inside with him.
The film stands as a microcosm of modern Brazilian society. The two robbers are of the underclass, hapless and mostly helpless, robbing as a way of survival due to lack of support from those can give it. The cook, one of the most important characters to the plot, is gay and from the Northeast of Brazil, a double whammy of things you don’t want to be in Brazil (there’s a lot of internal xenophobia, especially in Sao Paolo, around people from the Northeast of Brazil due to the region being the poorest in the country). The smug upper-class diners are a federal attorney and his wife, who make threats using their status but are powerless without the legal institution directly behind them. The retired police officer, haunted by his extrajudicial killings, tries to reason with Inacio on the basis that both understand violence. The waitress, Sara (Luciana Paes, justifiably deserving her award) sycophantically looks up to Inacio attempting to curry favour and get a leg up.
Inacio, for what it’s worth, is a clear stand-in for Jair Bolsonaro, a figure much worse than Trump, currently running for president in Brazil, and with a genuinely possible chance of victory. Bolsonaro is a supporter of the military dictatorship that once ruled Brazil and has called for lax gun control, death to homosexuals and sterilisation of the poor. Unfortunately, he was stabbed recently on the campaign trail and survived, which is even worse; it improved his polls out of sympathy, because you can vote for a living martyr but you can’t vote for a dead one.
Friendly Beast was made before Bolsonaro’s run at Presidency, but he’s been a figure in Brazilian politics for a long time, and it’s clear Inacio is a stand-in for him or the type of person who votes for him. Obsessively masculine, in love with vigilantism, keen to please the upper classes but willing to eject them when they get in his way, he is a crude, jealous figure, leavened with hate. Whereas the poor may engage in violent activity as a means of survival, and the rich engage in violent activity as a means of maintaining their wealth, the Bolsonarista middle classes engage in violence because they can.
In pitting all these figures together, Gabrial Amaral has produced a searingly political film that doesn’t shy away from confronting Brazil’s issues head on. But rather than a dull political tract, the narrative structure of the film is built out of a natural by-product of various characters’ behaviour and status. Nothing feels symbolic or done for contrivance. The natural progression of the film feels entirely logical, and as such, completely terrifying and scary. Brilliant stuff.
Luz takes an entirely different approach. At barely 70 minutes long it is in and out by the time most films are warming up their third act. Roger Corman’s old adage that “any film can be improved by cutting a third of its running time” comes to mind. It’s been three days, and so many images from the film are still seared into my mind. I recall, at one point, having the distinct sensation that my jaw had dropped and unhinged, landing on my lap.
To bother explaining the plot would be pointless – there’s stuff here about demonic possession and so on surrounding Luz, a female taxi driver who turns herself into the police. She’s played by Luana Velis. looking like the absolute spitting image of Winona Ryder’s taxi driver in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991), which is definitely intentional but is also the only thing this film has in common with Jarmusch’s relaxed, conversational style. Andrej Zulawski, director of classics like Possession is probably more relevant, or maybe the full-on nightmarish vision of David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Maybe also, the sheer stillness and ethereality of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu.
Luz is like all of these films but also none of them. It is entirely its own unique package. Filmed on 16mm, which looks absolutely astounding, with a thunderous soundtrack; more than enough of a nod to the synth soundtracks of John Carpenter, but with thrashing drums added to the mix. The sets are sparse and the people populating them are even fewer (beyond the five main characters who make up the film, you only see maybe three background figures). It is a film built wholly on unforgettable images and a never-ending headlong rush forward, dripping with fog and atmosphere, every moment built on suggestion and implication. It’s rare that to feel a film has defeated my attempts to describe how I reacted to it – reading this back I feel as if I have failed.
It may struggle to get a proper distribution deal thanks to its difficult demeanour and short running time, but Jesus…you owe it to yourself to try and track this one down. Wow.
words Fedor Tot
The rest of Fractured Visions is reviewed below