brazil

Beyond Ipanema

by James McNally on March 4, 2010

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,SXSW

Beyond Ipanema
Editor’s Note: I’ve decided to begin posting my reviews of films screening at SXSW early, hope­fully helping anyone attending make some decisions about what to see. Beyond Ipanema is screening on Thursday March 18 at 9:30pm at the Alamo Ritz 1.

Beyond Ipanema (Director: Guto Barra): Early on in this doc­u­mentary about Brazilian music, David Byrne points out that unlike many other coun­tries, Brazil’s prin­cipal export has been cul­ture, espe­cially music. The film patiently traces the influ­ence of Brazilian music on North American cul­ture begin­ning with Carmen Miranda’s first per­form­ance in New York City in 1939. Miranda’s string of films throughout the 1940s were immensely pop­ular, and she always insisted on singing a few songs and saying a few lines of dia­logue in Brazilian Portuguese. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, American jazz music was influ­enced by the sounds of bossanova, and a col­lab­or­a­tion between Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz led to a huge hit song, “The Girl from Ipanema,” sung by Joao’s wife Astrud. Sergio Mendes and his band Brasil ’66 were also hugely pop­ular in North America during the ‘60s.

Brazilian influ­ence was dormant for nearly the next two dec­ades until David Byrne’s Luaka Bop record label began releasing (or in many cases re-releasing) Brazilian artists in North America again, in the late ‘80s. Since that time, the influ­ence has gone in both dir­ec­tions, with many artists util­izing “mashup” methods to incor­porate dif­ferent ele­ments into their music. As many of the Brazilian com­ment­ators note, Brazil has a long his­tory of ingesting out­side influ­ences and making them Brazilian, so the birth of DJ cul­ture has been wel­comed with open arms.

Unfortunately, the last 15 minutes of the film were unplay­able on the screener I received, so my review will not be entirely com­plete, but my largest cri­ti­cism of the film to that point is that there just wasn’t enough actual music. This was more of a problem with the classic artists of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and is likely the result of expensive licensing issues, but it detracts in a major way from the film. If any music doc­u­mentary deserves more than talking heads, even ones as famous as Byrne, Devendra Banhart, and Gilberto Gil, it’s one about a musical cul­ture as vibrant and alive as Brazil’s. Though I was able to note a few bands worth fol­lowing up (CSS, Garotas Suecas, and almost-forgotten psy­che­delic pion­eers Os Mutantes), I would have loved to see and hear more per­form­ances and fewer talking heads (and Talking Heads).

Official site of the film

6/10(6/10)

Tagged as: #sxsw10, brazil, music

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Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)

by James McNally on November 8, 2007

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly doc­u­mentary screening pro­gramme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audi­ences in Toronto (and now Calgary and Vancouver!) their reg­ular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs fest­ival itself.

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (Director: Jason Kohn): First-time dir­ector Jason Kohn’s film was a con­tro­ver­sial winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this past year, and after seeing it, I can under­stand why. It’s a travelogue of sorts, whisking us around Brazil to talk to police, politi­cians, pro­sec­utors, busi­nessmen, vic­tims of kid­nap­ping, and even a kid­napper him­self. The film’s tagline is “When the rich steal from the poor, the poor steal the rich” and the basic out­line is that it’s a film about a cul­ture of theft. We see all the pre­cau­tions the rich are forced to take to avoid the ransom kid­nap­pings that are now wide­spread in cities like Sao Paolo. They buy bul­let­proof cars, they take heli­copters and con­tem­plate implanting micro­chips under their skin. We hear from a kidnap victim who had both of her ears sliced off, a common tactic of the kid­nap­pers to show how ser­ious they are. Kidnapping is such a growth industry that now plastic sur­geons have developed ways of cre­ating new ears from rib car­tilage. On the other hand, we’re intro­duced to cor­rupt politi­cian Jader Barbalho, whose graft included the estab­lish­ment of frog farms to launder gov­ern­ment grant money. Recurring images of the frogs, including a mem­or­able sequence of one frog devouring another, seem to work as a crude meta­phor. With a pop­u­la­tion of 20 mil­lion, Sao Paolo’s res­id­ents are just as crammed together as the hap­less frogs, and the res­ulting anarchy is almost inevitable.

Kohn’s film is full of start­ling and often beau­tiful imagery, and his con­scious decision to shoot on film and in ana­morphic widescreen tells me a lot. Along with a jaunty soundtrack of Brazilian samba, the gor­geous images look better than they have a right to. I caught myself asking whether a film about such ugli­ness had a right to look so pretty. And I think that’s where my problem with the film lies. It feels like a carefully-constructed object that was planned around aes­thetic, rather than moral, con­cerns. It looks great, but I’m just not sure there’s a real heart to the film. Many of the director’s choices seem cal­cu­lated to dis­tance the viewer from the hor­rors he’s observing. For instance, Kohn made the decision to forego sub­titles in many of the inter­views, including the kidnap victim’s. Instead, we hear the dia­logue in Brazilian Portuguese, and then hear the trans­la­tion in English from the trans­lator, who is also in the frame with the sub­ject. It’s a strange effect. As well, there is no attempt at any ana­lysis of the prob­lems of Brazil, other than a throwaway line about how the Portuguese estab­lished Brazil simply to plunder it.

I remember hearing as a young stu­dent about how Brasilia was designed from the ground up as the new cap­ital of Brazil, and the film does convey some of the tar­nished futur­istic optimism that was coming out of the country in the 60s and 70s. Kohn described the film as a kind of “non-fiction science-fiction” film, and I think he does a pass­able job of con­veying the feeling that Sao Paolo’s sin­ister land­scape may soon seem very familiar to the rest of us.

But I’m still con­vinced that this is more an exer­cise in style than substance.

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: brazil, corruption, Doc Soup, Documentaries

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