Bolsonaroâs Culture Wars Hit Brazilâs Cinemas
After winning honors at Cannes, the dystopian âBacurauâ stirs ire at home.
Not long ago ultraconservative Brazilian voters fed up with the rotten political class came out of the closet to help elect a leader they could call their own. The result was right-wing Jair Bolsonaro and a deepening culture war. Now the ideological battles that have poisoned public discourse and set Brazilian against Brazilian have reached the cineplex.
Earlier this year, partisans squared off over the Netflix documentary âThe Edge of Democracy,â an impassioned â or tendentious, pick your flag â first-person account of the impeachment of former Workersâ Party president Dilma Rousseff, which eventually cleared the way to Bolsonaroâs election. They will have at it again over âMarighella,â a forthcoming biopic on the Brazilian guerrilla who led an armed revolt against the military dictatorship. But first comes this seasonâs tirade, courtesy of âBacurau,â a dystopian fantasy about a native community under siege by globe-trotting gringos with anger issues and heavy weapons.
Talented filmmakers â Brazil has many â might be expected to help show the way beyond the ideological furies that have consumed the national zeitgeist, and so help Brazilians re-imagine a better, more civilized society. âBacurau,â which recently opened in national theaters after a festival debut and the jury prize at Cannes, isnât that sort of picture. Instead of a balm, directors Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles went for conflagration.
Mendonca Filho and Dornelles disavow any intention of making an activist picture or sending a political message. All you need is a social media account to see through the disclaimer. âWe are people. We are resistance,â one fan wrote on Twitter. âBacurauâ scored Brazilian cinemaâs sixth-best box office take ever for a first-week debut. The film resonated especially in the northeast, the storied patch of hardscrabble where the tale unfolds but also, tellingly, where voters rejected Bolsonaro as a right-wing intruder or worse.
Not everyone was impressed, and the quarrel has spread beyond the arts pages. âA testament to the extinction of intelligent life on the Brazilian left,â University of Sao Paulo sociologist Demetrio Magnoli said in dismissing the film. Thatâs harsh, but by going over the top, âBacurauâ falls short.
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