family ties
by Douglas Messerli
Kleber Mendonça Filho (screenwriter and director) O soma o redor (Neighboring Sounds) / 2012
During the opening credits of Kleber
Mendonça Filho's first full-length feature film, Neighboring Sounds—a movie I watched yesterday at the Los Angeles
Film Festival—we are shown a short visual history of the Brazilian city Recife
in the country's Northeastern state of Pernambuco. The large colonial buildings
in the middle of nowhere seem to dwarf the native field workers, whose heavy
labors obviously made this part of the country rich—particularly for the
plantation owners. And we recognize that Recife was created out of that
colonial system. Yet nothing is made obvious of that underlying political
reality once the film gets way in the modern city of towering skyscrapers. The
film moves forward languidly, posing as in a kind of domestic drama, except
that the different domestic situations of the neighbors it explores are so
multiple and complex it is hard, at first, to find the film's focus.
On the first floor of a sizable condominium building is a young woman,
Bia (Maeve Jinkings), who is caring for two children alone. Her condo, although
pleasant, is clearly middle-class. And the bars over the windows she faces give
the place a sense of deep imprisonment. Outside her window sits a guard dog who
howls throughout the night, making it difficult to sleep. Throughout the film,
Bia attempts to find different ways to quiet the dog, beginning with a piece of
beef into which she has inserted a sleeping pill, tossing it to the hungry
beast. Later, we discover, she has purchased a dog alarm whose high-pitched
sounds quiet animals—and humans. By the end of the film, after her cleaning
women has blown the electrical circuit of the dog-quieting device, she
purchases firecrackers which so terrifies the poor animal, it runs away in a
howl.
Along the way, we get
portraits of her two intelligent children, clearly more mature than their
mother, free from her penchant for pot, and her kinky habit of using her
washing machine for sexual stimulation. Without any apparent source of income,
except, perhaps, for a boyfriend, she hires tutors, nonetheless, to teach her
children Mandarin Chinese and English; she pays for her pot on time; and, as
mentioned, is able to afford a cleaning women, as well as a large new
flat-screen TV. Her envious sister lives down the block.
In another, much more comfortable condo in the building, lives João
(Gustavo Jahn), a handsome, hirsute real estate broker, seen first in bed with
a beautiful woman with whom he has just spent the night. Although it is nothing
spectacular, his apartment is much better furnished and has a splendid view.
His daily cook and cleaning woman has long been with family (his parents have
both died) and is being retired in a few weeks. Mentioned at the breakfast
table that his new girlfriend once lived on these same streets, years before,
the cleaning woman warns him that she's probably related; they may even be
sister and brother, an odd statement at this point in the film, which we let
pass since nothing seems to be made of it. When they descend to the street they
discover that her car has been broken into, her CD player stolen.
Throughout the morning, João visits various neighbors and street
workers, drinking coffee and chatting with them in an attempt to discover who
might have burgled the car. Indirectly, they all seem to suspect a man named
Dinho (Yuro Holanda), whom, when João later visits in a nearby building, turns
out to be his younger cousin, evidently known for his adolescent delinquencies.
Outraged by João's suspicions, Dinho has his maid show him out; but by the time
he reaches the street, the maid has called him, bringing down a wrapped CD
which Dinho has handed over. It turns out, later, that the CD is not the same
one stolen from the girl's car.
At another time in this fragmented day, we see João showing an apartment
to a potential buyer who has heard that the apartment has been previously owned
by a woman who has jumped from its window. She attempts to broker a discount
due to that event, João responding, "Look, the incident has no impact on
the quality of the place." But we feel somehow something is wrong here. When her young daughter
stands alone on the balcony, a young boy throws a soccer ball up to land
several stories below her, demanding she get it and return it to him. Nothing
has openly happened, but there is something eerie about the situation and the
neighborhood in general, if nothing else because of seemingly dissociation of
the director's various narrative strands.
And then there are all those neighborhood noises: the dog, rain, a
peddler's loud music, the cars, the sounds of love-making, the children at
play, and the hundreds of voices. When a neighborhood woman, coming out to
retrieve her car, speaks rudely to one of the car washers, he takes a key to
the back end of her automobile as she drives off. In a strange condo meeting of
João's building, the tenants discuss firing their lobby night watchman, who has
worked in the building for fourteen years, because he has been sleeping on the
job. João insists they pay him a pension, but the others are outraged. He is
only too happy to escape the "weird condo meeting" to meet up once
again with the girl he has spent the previous night.
More significantly, men have shown up, clapping out various neighbors
(although the residents all have protective cameras, many do not have
doorbells) to sell their services as security guards. Even their sales pitch
sounds more like a threat than a commitment to the safety of the community;
yet, after their visit to the wealthiest man in the neighborhood, Francisco (W.
J. Solha)—who we soon discover is João and Dinho's grandfather, a man who once
owned the entire street—the old man convinces the neighborhood to hire them.
Perhaps they will help prevent further car thefts. Pitching a small rain
shelter, Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) and his friends spend the nights on the
streets, where every sound seems to create suspense.
Filho juggles all of these seemingly unrelated events with deadpan
earnestness, offering us few clues to the significance of his several
characters and even less help with evaluating their actions. The director has
structured his film, however, in three parts: "Guard Dog, Security Guards,
and Body Guards." Gradually, we begin see that something is indeed wrong
with this picture of normalcy. So much of these individuals' lives are centered
around protection and the people as well as the poor and racially mixed figures
from whom they are protecting themselves, that we begin to comprehend that
something in this world is truly amiss: issues of security and protection,
along with their relations to their cleaners, cooks, and other servants have
come to dominate their lives. Unlike São Paulo and Rio de Janiero, where almost
every substantial apartment building and home contains a small security tower
(I personally observed these on my visits to Brazil), Recife is relatively new
to these intrusions. Yet it is clear how much of an impact these changes have
had on all the neighbor's quality of living.
As the movie moves forward, moreover, the fears of these neighbors grow
more and more intense despite the fact that little else happens. A car shows up
on the street, driving erratically slow, creating a tense sense of drama, which
ends with a kind of comic coda as a woman exits to vomit. More significantly,
Bia's daughter has a terrible dream wherein, in the middle of the night,
hundreds of men jump over the wall, one by one, into her back yard. When she
gets up to check the intrusion, her mother and her bed have disappeared. Just
as the needs of security have risen, so the fears of intrusion have increased.
João's beloved girlfriend leaves him; she has sensed there is a sadness about
the place.
Clodoaldo, meanwhile, has become a trusted member of the neighborhood,
given a key to water a vacationing neighbor's plants. In that all-white house
(symbol of the divide financially and racially between the haves and the
have-nots) he steals in with Francesco's maid to have sex. João comes home to
his apartment to find the maid's son sleeping on his couch. Unspoken racial
boundaries, as Filho has observed in an interview, are clearly being breached.
A foreman of Francesco's plantation has been found murdered, and
Francisco calls Clodoaldo, demanding a meeting. When Clodaldo and his brother
show up to Francesco's well-protected house, he tells them of his fears,
offering them a position as body guards along with their security positions.
Presumably in an attempt to understand the old man's relationship with the
victim, they turn the tables, revealing that they have paid a visit to his old
foreman. They name a date from long ago which is meaningless to Francesco until
he realizes through their names, that they are the children, now grown, of a
worker or servant who, evidently, his foreman has killed.
Suddenly, the bits and pieces of the lives Filho has been showing us,
fall into place. Francesco stands up in terror just as the film suddenly snaps
into the view outside Bia's condo where she and the children set off the
firecrackers in order to terrify the dog. The film ends in an explosion of
sound, the screen going black.
One might describe Filho's film as a kind of laidback Brazilian version
of The Godfather, wherein the sins of
the grandfather are visited upon his family, friends, and even neighbors who
help to maintain his closed, isolated world. Certainly, as João suggests,
family ties can just as often make one desire to be an orphan.
Los Angeles, June 25, 2012
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 2012).
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