/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-BRAZIL: Delirious Critique of Corruption

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 11 2004 (IPS) - There is no paradise in Brazil that is not be surrounded by hell, corruption often becomes the route to fulfilling modest dreams such as owning a home, justice is glaringly absent, and the only thing left to hope for is divine intervention.

But what does all of this have to do with cinema?

The film "Redentor" (The Redeemer) depicts the woes plaguing South America’s largest nation through a bewildering variety of means, such as using a dead narrator – hardly a novelty in literature -, dialogues with God that require special effects, an opera-like atmosphere, a bit of slapstick, black humour and sudden twists.

Claudio Torres’ debut as film director has prompted an enthusiastic response from some critics. The film is refreshing at a time when the Brazilian filmmaking industry seems afraid to move beyond realism and appears to be mainly concerned with broadening its market.

The plot of this "dramatic comedy" is based on an incident that is all too common in Brazil. A wealthy, unscrupulous businessman is about to finish the construction of a 480-apartment building when his company goes under and he commits suicide.

The huge unfinished block of flats, "Paradise Condominiums", which was repossessed by the bank, is located in a rising middle-class neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro. But right next to the building is a favela, or shantytown, whose 20,000 inhabitants include the workers who built the apartment building and never received their last paychecks.

As one might expect, one fine day the dwellers of the favela decide to move into the apartments. "We built them," says one of the workers in defence of the decision. What is illegal, he argues, is to leave a building unoccupied with so many people living in favelas, or homeless.

Otavio, the dead businessman’s son, tries to salvage the company by following his father’s methods, seeking funds through shady dealings with the government in the capital, Brasilia. But he fails.

The corrupt minister is now a foe, since his own wife became a victim of the construction company, having purchased an apartment into which she was never able to move.

The other main character is a journalist, Celio, who is assigned to cover the scandal for a local newspaper.

Although they were childhood friends, the reporter hates Otavio because his own father spent all his savings on an apartment in "Paradise Condominiums",and his bitter family had to move in with relatives, where they live in crowded, uncomfortable conditions.

But Celio starts down the slippery slope. In exchange for a promise to recover his father’s apartment, he writes a story favourable to Otavio. He then agrees to be Otavio’s front man, putting his name on a bank account where the businessman attempts to hide 50 million dollars he embezzled from the company.

But immediately afterwards Celio finds out that his ailing father had joined the slum-dwellers who invaded the "Paradise" and died of a heart attack in the apartment that he had previously purchased, when the police stormed in to evict the squatters.

Celio goes mad, and hears messages from God telling him to set right the injustices.

The film also goes mad, becoming frenzied and delirious. Celio is arrested, but he escapes and organises the distribution of the businessman’s dirty money to the workers who were cheated out of their pay.

In the end, he becomes kind of a redeeming angel of the poor, after the favela-dwellers themselves, who at one point believe he is deceiving them, kill him.

It took Torres eight years to make the film. He wrote the screenplay together with his sister, actress Fernanda Torres, and experienced screenwriter Elena Soárez. All of the actors are well known from the popular prime-time soap operas and other programmes produced by the Globo network, Brazil’s broadcasting giant.

Miguel Falabella and Pedro Cardoso, who play Otavio and Celio, are both famous comic actors.

Nevertheless, "Redentor", which made its premiere in mid-September, is not a likely box-office hit. It is a film that escapes present trends by returning to the absurd and the nonsensical as a unique manner of depicting reality in Brazil, a style that in the past produced notable exemplars of Brazilian filmmaking.

It also questions the morals of Brazilian society, which is depicted as the ever-ready accomplice of corruption, and ridicules the religious faith that leads people to wait for magic solutions to the country’s pressing social problems, given the absence of justice.

Torres, however, establishes himself as an innovative and talented director, in a generation shaped by the techniques of advertising and video clips.

Talent runs in the family. Torres is the son of legendary Brazilian theatre and film actress Fernanda Montenegro and Fernando Torres, another successful actor – both of whom appear in "Redentor", a "family" film.