Brazil's entry to this year's Oscars. Also nominated for best casting, best picture and best actor for Wagner Moura's performance. Written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. In several sittings due to a failure to grip.
Just like the previous year's I'm Still Here (2024) it's once again 1977 in Brazil but this time we're in the small town of Recife. Actually we're there now and then, with Moura also playing his own son in the present day on a somewhat jarring interleaved second track. We're told firstly via an interview and then shown how Moura's academic comes into conflict with a capitalist/industrialist/member of the extractive class from the other side of the north/south split in the country. This leads to him being targeted for assassination in the 1977 timeline. At that time his wife is gone but I don't recall finding out why or how.
Politically there is lots of the usual stagey posturing which yielded much personal peril and no actual change. There's a network that supports survivors of the regime's nastier behaviours but we're not shown how that functions, just that it does.
The film acts as something of a time capsule lovingly made in the present day, much like the current retro computer scene and One Battle After Another (2025). There is no nuance; all the effort went into simulating mystery by delaying the inevitable expositions with excessive nesting of stories. (As with The Outrun (2024) you need to pay attention to the hair, here facial.) Too many scenes are overlong. Much of it is generic: the carnival scenes are generic. Some of the editing is strange: Moura walks out of a darkened cinema straight onto the street and a reverse-angle shot shows us a lit window right next to the door he came out of. The severed leg (found in the gut of a shark) is weird and the CGI for it is terribly cartoonish. I did not understand the weird two-faced cat.
A Critic's Pick by Manohla Dargis. Circuitous. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. Novelistic.
