intoxicado

Bacurau (2019) 
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles
Gore Lecture Series #2

Former Brazilian dictator/president Jair Bolsonaro was recently spotted in Florida. He was there for a Trump rally, though really he’s just been hiding out after inciting riots following his failed reelection bid in December 2022. Talk about U.S. influence on globalization! He was photographed eating solo at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, in an image that’s comically Lynchian in all its layered implications. I’m tickled that the man who professed that “the truth will set you free” as his campaign slogan is living his best truth by chowing down on a soggy chicken wing in a retirement community. 

Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles don’t make explicit mention of Bolsonaro in Bacurau, but his presence casts a pronounced shadow. Filho has quietly amassed one of the more impressive filmographies of the century, with his films Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius standing out as some of the most impressive capsules of Brazilian cinema since at least Fernando Meirelles’ City of God. This co-directing effort with Dornelles is a refreshing and violent detour from those preceding films, but nevertheless fits snuggly within the thematic concerns that have preoccupied Filho from the start. 

Like Neighboring Sounds and Aquarius, Bacurau examines Brazil’s growth into a world power as a result of globalization. While Neighboring Sounds saw this encroaching globalization on a community level and Aquarius saw it happen to the individual, Bacurau observes Brazil’s last holdouts. The town of Bacurau is no longer on Brazil’s map; it’s a township that is off-the-grid and functioning without the aid of the larger, globalized communities surrounding it. When the crooked mayor, vying for favor among the voting bloc, comes in with expired food and book donations, the town greets him with requisite disgust. They abandon the streets, shouting from their domiciles for the dam to be reopened. The mayor leaves Bacurau with one of the community’s young women in tow, leaving her to wander back in the deserted nighttime of the rural landscape. 

The transgressions begin to pile up, in what Sayak Valencia would cite as “everything [being] reduced to profit, business, and capital, nothing more.” The film opens with the death of the community matriarch and it would seemingly suggest the end of a generational tie; a legacy that can now only be maintained by the spoken word. As the community forges on, they’re greeted by the surprising visit of a tourist couple on motorbikes. They’re fellow Brazilians, but occupy the more opulent São Paulo region. Their visit is met with curiosity by locals, as the husband-wife tourists brandish annoyingly colorful outfits and possess an air of stuffiness that comes with privilege. A few attempt to cajole the couple into going to Bacruau’s history museum, but they scoff at the opportunity before leaving. It’s the calm before the violent storm, as the realization that the two are merely surveilling the community settles in quickly. 

What follows has been described as a Western or a siege film, whereby the people of Bacurau must defend their territory from a group of American vigilantes whose singular goal is to wipe out the town. And while narratively Filho and Dornelles summon the memories of films like The Wild Bunch or Assault on Precinct 13, the subtext implies something more thoughtful. Valencia makes frequent mention of the “dyad of poverty and violence,” and it’s presented with astonishing clarity in Bacurau, wherein “violent actions are also a manifestation of a broader expression of social unrest, since ‘crime’ besides generating additional profit, is also a means to express discontent.” What follows is violence as resistance, wherein Bacurau relies on monuments of its past (the museum housing a history of violence) to defend itself from encroaching colonizers.

The whys and whences behind the Americans who are attempting to take over the town is not clearly described and it doesn’t need to be; their mechanism of the broader consequences of globalization, whereby a homogenization threatens to distort and seize control of a land’s culture and identity. There’s a quiet anxiety that simmers when schoolchildren discover that Bacurau is not clearly visible on a Google Map - does it mean that they don’t exist? What Filho and Dornelles so passionately express, as if a plea to their audience, is that yes, they exist. But they absolutely need to fight for that acknowledgement. And to do so is to engross yourself in the present while never losing sight of the past that brought you there. And in that truth, they’ll be set free.