/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-BRAZIL: The Camera Focuses on a Nation’s Sores

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 2 2003 (IPS) - "Amarelo Manga" (Yellow Mango), the first feature-length film by Claudio Assis, feeds a current of Brazilian film that is more concerned with showing the open wounds of the national reality than with telling a story.

Mango yellow is the colour of violence, misery, disease and decay in the poor neighbourhoods of Recife, capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco.

The film is a bitter portrait of the lack of a decent future for the poor majority that lives in Brazil’s urban peripheries.

After winning awards at national and international film festivals, including in Berlin and in Toulouse, France, "Amarelo Manga" made its commercial premiere in theatres throughout Brazil in mid-August.

Assis, 42, has a reputation as a rebel in the film industry because of his controversial ideas. He defends the notion that film can serve a social purpose and he aims to portray the reality of the Brazilian people, in the tradition of raw naturalism.

"Amarelo Manga" is unique also because it was shot in Recife, which contributes to consolidating the capital in the northeast as a new pole for Brazilian film, moving away from production monopolised by the major metropolises of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

The production costs were a relatively low 800,000 reais (around 270,000 dollars), a quarter of the average budget for Brazilian feature films today. It took Assis six years to put together the financing.

But in a country where millions suffer hunger, lack health care and access to quality education, the effort to make low-cost films is justified, the director says.

His "Amarelo Manga" is categorised as the latest product of the "arid movie" school, filmmakers from Recife taking on the themes emerging from Brazil’s poorest region.

The first feature-length film in that group, "Perfumed Dance", by two young directors, Paulo Caldas and Lirio Ferreira, portrayed the rural reality of the Brazilian northeast.

In "Mango Yellow", Assis employs what he learned making documentaries: the camera lingers over images of the impoverished neighbourhoods of Recife, the squalor of the streets, the fixed gaze of the people, who have little future and less hope.

His fictional characters are cruel, with a variety of perversions. "The human being is stomach and sex," is repeated throughout, as if it were the film’s slogan.

The protagonist, Kika, played by Dira Paes (who has made a name for herself in many of Brazil’s recent films), is extremely religious and is a member of an evangelical church, until she chances upon her husband, Wellington "Cannibal", with his lover.

Kika attacks her rival with her teeth, tearing off part of her ear.

Later, saying she has died inside, she leaves the puritanism of her religion, and has sex – ironically – with a necrophiliac marijuana dealer, who gets off shooting up cadavers that he gets from a corrupt employee of the city morgue.

Long and bloody scenes in the slaughterhouse where Cannibal works reinforce the raw aesthetic that Assis has developed.

Among the central characters is an obese woman who suffers frequent asthma attacks and is always accompanied by an oxygen tank, which she also uses for her own sexual pleasure.

There is also a beautiful bar-owner who is the object of desire of everyone but complains of her loneliness and the exhausting work she does every day, and a gay cook who sets up all sorts of schemes in an attempt to win Cannibal’s love.

Despite his limited budget, Assis was able to bring together famous TV and film actors: Matheus Nachtergaele as the homosexual cook, Chico Diaz as a slaughterhouse worker and Jonas Bloch as the necrophiliac drug dealer.

But the big names are unlikely to be enough at the box office. "Amarelo Manga" is disturbing to the general public because it portrays people at their most dreadful, "without makeup", as the director says.

The images of the man who is considered the best photographer of Brazilian film today, Walter Carvalho, are suffocating with their views from above and from below, in enclosed spaces, lingering on ugly faces and ruined walls.

The end is not a happy one. Everyone is in the same boat, sinking into social and moral decadence. Kika, with her wounded honour and without her religion, which made her different, ends up like the rest of the characters, giving herself over to casual sex – and asking her hairdresser to dye her hair "mango yellow".