from the
other side of the lens
by Douglas Messerli
Rodrigo de Oliveira (screenwriter
and director) Os Primeiros Soldados (The First Fallen) / 2021
It is 1983 in the small town of
Vitória, Brazil. A gay man, Suzano (Johnny Massaro)— recently returned from
France where he was studying biology, and staying with his sister, Maura (Clara
Choveaux) and her son Muriel (Alex Bonin)—is at the beach with his much-loved
nephew, the young Muriel trying to engage him with questions about the
celebratory New Year’s evening that night. Since he has returned, Suzano has
been inexplicably distracted and distant from the family who loves him and the
town’s friends who are delighted that he’s back.
Suzano, a gay man, has evidently a reputation for his wonderful drag
performances, and his nephew, also gay it appears, is cautious about his
uncle’s question whether or not he’s planning to perform in drag in evening,
arguing that he could never be as “beautiful” as his uncle was, attempting to
get an answer of why Suzano is not planning on performing or perhaps even
attending the event at the local gay bar Genet. He provides no answers but does
award Muriel with a lovely red bolt of tulle which he might wear for the
evening if he wants.
Muriel’s mother and Suzano’s sister, Maura works as a nurse, and
evidently on her way to work is involved in a traffic backup. Apparently a
transgender figures, Rose (Renata Carvalho) we later perceive her to be, has
punched out the window to a bus and is still in the process of verbally abusing
the bus driver and police who attempting to calm her when Maura, getting out of
the car after recognizing Rose as a friend of her brother’s, intervenes. The
problem it seems is that she has been refused to even be seen at the local
hospital where Maura works. She is ill and worried, but they won’t treat her.
Maura assures her that she will look into the matter.
In these first few scenes the viewers have suddenly entered into a world
in which they cannot quite determine what is happening and why. Relationships
seem odd and unexplained. Why are people like Rose and even Maura’s brother
behaving so oddly? Mother and son talk over the issue as they sit alone at the
end of the long evening. The whole town seems confused, but we are even more at
odds since we are being presented only a slice of this community, a small gay coterie
that seems to include Maura as well.
Something seems akilter. As on-line critic Brent Marchant observes:
“It can be terrifying to know that
something is wrong but not know what it is. So it was for many in the LGBTQ+
community in the early ʼ80s….”
He goes on to argue that Os
Primeiros Soldados treats these scenes too subtly, perhaps too cryptically
which results it the audiences’ confusion.
But I think that is precisely filmmaker Rodrigo de Oliveira’s point. No
one knows what is happening in the backwaters of Vitória, Brazil, nor perhaps
even in the sophisticated European capitol city of Paris, with which Suzano
still keeps contact through his lover, who he has left behind, Adrian. But, as
the nurses in William Finn and James Lapine’s musical Falsettos intoned
in the 1981 New York off-Broadway production “something bad is happening.” And
it was not until 1985, two years after the early events in de Oliveria’s film,
that the first US film dealt with this strange phenomenon, finally known as
AIDS, in Arthur J. Bressan’s film Buddies. Even then hospitals were
asking visitors to dress in full protective garb and there was still no clinic
devoted to the disease in Manhattan.
That night in 1983 in Vitória, Rose
performs, after several years silence, once again for the last time, singing a
song too sad to even finish before the others shout and scream the New Year in.
Her dear friend Humberto (Victo Camilo) is filming the entire show, and
afterwards meets a young man from his hometown with whom he immediately falls
in love, but with whom, despite their deep kisses, refuses to have sex.
Suzano, to everyone’s disappointment is a no-show, telling his friend of
Joca (Higor Campagnaro) that he is planning to return to Paris that very
evening, his wealthy lover having provided a return ticket. Joca does not
believe him. Nor do we, observing Suzano visiting a small cottage in the jungle
where he lights a fire, scratches out the countries on a map as they celebrate
the New Year’s, and sets off fireworks near the small cottage—a tiny ranch, we
later learn, is owned by Suzano.
Suzano disappears from the lives of his sister and nephew, as soon after
do the beloved transgender Rose and even Humberto, his new lover not being able
to explain his disappearance. Those wonderful people are sorely missed. Genet’s is having financial problems and will
be soon be closing.
Maura has heard from her brother occasionally in quick calls from Paris,
one of which we overhear, Suzano
evidently calling from a pay phone (for my younger readers, there once were
such things in the street, stationery telephones in which one could communicate
with others), refusing to provide his sister with his number. He tells her that
his studies are going nicely, although he misses her and Muriel, and asks his
nephew to write him more regularly, the letters taking some time to reach him.
Muriel has grown and is planning his own celebration this New Year’s at
the club. A girlfriend helps him pick out the right outfit to wear, and as good
luck he throws a sash of the red tulle fabric that Suzano had given him.
Meanwhile at the bar in the midst of dancing, a very thin, heavily
coughing, obviously dying Suzano shows up, no one there any longer, it appears,
recognizing him. He carries with him a huge pack of snapshots, pictures, we
later discover, of his body, front and back, featuring several large red and
purple patches of Kaposi Sarcoma, the cancer sores that appear on many AIDS
sufferers. He hands these out to the dancers and drops a huge batch of the
photos as he leaves the place, unable to catch his breath. Across the way
Muriel is arriving with his friends and suddenly spies his uncle, rushing to
his side as Suzano asks him to take him to the clinic immediately.
Unfortunately, the boy has no transportation, his mother working as a
night-nurse. By the time Maura hears what has happened and rushes to the
clinic, Muriel sits alone in a small front, brightly lit waiting space, while
the doors to the clinic itself have been locked by the doctors who have fled in
a hurry. Only a nurse is left within, unable to open up what can only now be
described as “the cells,” the doctors having taken the keys with them in their
flight. Even Maura’s outrage as a fellow nurse gets her nowhere. As the
returning doctor explains the next morning, the small clinic of two doctors
serves over 300 patients; but the government would have immediately closed it
down if they knew it had been visited by a man who died of the still unnamed “plague.”
A will is found, leaving the “ranch” to
Muriel and asking that Suzano’s ashes be scattered at a stream on the little
ranch.
As I have hinted, time in this film is
delusional. And all that we have witnessed so far represents only the first
half of this one hour and 47-minute film.
When Maura and Muriel bring the ashes to
Suzano’s hidden cottage they find Rose and Humberto living there, having also
been suffering through the year with Suzano of AIDS. The rest of the film
reveals how the trio, broken free from society, attempt to survive with the
help of funds sent from Paris by Adrien, drugs provided via the Paris black
market sent to the local Vitória post box, with a complete medical set up where
the three patients daily log in their weights, new cancerous growths, mental
delusions, diets, and psychological conditions along with a regimen of
regularly filming themselves as specimens and at play. They suffer each other’s
heartbreaks—for one entire day Suzano wakes up and cannot remember where or why
he is before the next day all turns to normal—and numerous fears. They have
gathered drugs from Russia that will kill them if the pain becomes too serious,
giving them over to Humberto, the newest refugee, to hide, commanded to bring
the store of boxes out from hiding only if he can determine that their desire
to die is with a reasoned mind.
Suzano gradually perceives that the disease has a benefit in that it
makes what is happening to all of us every day very specific, allowing him a
new sense of meaning for his now specific lifespan of 1 to 2 years. They cook,
celebrate one another, and suffer together in tears—all memorialized on the
videos we watch in the second half of the film, which we realize by film’s end
we are watching with Muriel, who has inherited their amateur medical clinic
which the cottage has become.
Near the end, they lose all hope when Suzano receives word that Adrian
has died of AIDS back in Paris, and that the loving force behind their survival
and the financial support he has provided has come to an end. Humberto even
brings out the pills, but no one takes them. They are determined to survive as
long as they are given, to wonder at the world around them and hope for a
miraculous cure—which we now know would never come. A way to suppress HIV
antibodies and to postpone the symptoms of AIDS was discovered, saving millions
of lives. But there is still no absolute “cure.”
It is at this point in the film when Suzano returns to the bar, dying in
the process to revisit Muriel and his mother.
At film’s end we see Muriel and a handsome friend picnicking outside the
ranch cottage. Another year must have passed, for they decide it is time to set
off the nearby fireworks. After the exciting display, they kiss and laugh and
kiss, looking forward clearly to their lives together.
Of all the many AIDS films I have seen, this is one of the best and
certainly the post positive; but then de Oliveira’s film has the advantage of
being able to look back through the other side of the lens at these “first
fallen,” the first soldiers in the never-ending battle against AIDS.
Los Angeles, October 17, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (October 2022).
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