Madiano Marcheti | Madalena / 2021

city of ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tiago Coelho, Thiago Gallego, Madiano Marcheti, Thiago Ortman, and Helena Vieira (screenplay), Madiano Marcheti (director) Madalena / 2021

 

Filmed in the Mato Grosso state of Brazil, the highland plateaus that contain some of the most luscious cropland of the country, the miles of miles of green soybean fields, the worker’s houses, the nearby urban area and the activities of those who live there are the real subjects of Madiano Marcheti’s dirge for all things sexual. Like large portions of the American Midwest and Southern states, the hard work, isolation, and rural values of the communities in Mato Grosso do not easily embrace the sexual world of Brazil’s vast urban centers such as Saõ Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Gay men, lesbians, and particularly transgender individuals are not welcome here, as the newspaper and radio reports daily chronicle the rash of bodies discovered of transgender women. 

    In fact, this film centers around just such a death, not reported for the most of the film and held secret by the first two of the film’s figures who realize she has disappeared and, in one case, know where her body lies. In this one-hour and 25-minute film, we catch only a brief early glimpse of the body, dressed in white, lying in a back field of soybeans so remote that it is visited mostly by drones and Rhea, the latter a wild bird similar to ostriches and emus which inhabit the South America. Indeed, the soybean fields and Rhea, at times, appear to be the central images of Marcheti’s stunningly beautiful film.

      As we encounter the individuals who live in this region, they are presented only with enigmatic and brief images, and there are few we even get know, the most notable, other than the missing corpse, being Luziane (Natália Mazarim), Cristiano (Rafael de Bona), and Bianca (Pâmella Yulle); and the director represents these characters almost as ghosts haunting this world of specters. I argue, in fact, that with regard to human beings, the entire film signifies a kind of haunting, the film presenting an agricultural world of Mato Grosso as beings in absence. It’s interesting that several characters express the desire to leave the area as soon as they can, while those who plan to remain seem ghostly, are nearly hollow individuals who, to use a William Faulkner trope, endure without necessarily prevailing.

      Perhaps the healthiest of these is Luziane, who has a good relationship with her grandfather and at least communicates with her mother, collecting money owed to the home-bound seamstress.

Luziane works as a club hostess, which puts her in touch with a wide range of the younger people of the nearby town, including Cristiano, although she does not personally know him.

      It is her attempt to collect from Madalena which clues her and the audience in on the fact that the titular figure of this film has gone missing. On her first visit she calls to her several times, but receives no response, and leaves without entering the house. On the second visit, when she receives no answer, she enters, finds the woman’s purse and removes the owed money; but she also recognizes in the fact that the purse is still in the house, that Madalena’s cat has been left unattended, and the place is in a state of disarray, all of which suggests that Madalena did not plan on a trip, that something is amiss.

      Luziane is a woman who can take charge, as we see her also doing at a voting spot, keeping out individuals who block the fire lanes, and nicely registering and organizing the voting lines. She does the same at the nightclub in which she works, taking tickets and checking those listed for attendance. The club itself seems to be a place of mixed sexuality, a space where young heterosexual dancers, gay and lesbian individuals (although we are not introduced to any of these), and transgender women all congregate. At work the second night Luziane suddenly sees a vision of what appears to be Madalena, all in white, drunk or drugged out of her mind. And she perceives it as a kind of spiritual vision, sharing her feelings about it with one of Madalena’s closest friends, who we will meet later.

      Although Cristiano attends the club, he is a kind of outsider since he is the son of the landowner whose employs most of the individuals of the community. He lives in a wealthy gated community; but his father has obviously insisted that he begin as a field worker, and Cristiano daily visits the fields talking and working with the ordinary laborers. What is most important to the story is that his father is temporarily out of town, and his mother is running for regional senator. Accordingly, he has been put in charge, his father insisting that he begin harvesting the crop the second day of this film, the very same day when, having been walking the fields in search of an intrusive weed that might endanger the crop, he comes across the body. We do not see the body, only the look upon his face and his immediate retreat.

      One might think that we would quickly report the discovery, but he does nothing of the kind. He only attempts to convince his father via cell-phone to wait a couple of more days for the beans to mature; but his father insists the harvesting must begin that very evening. And Cristiano is at wit’s end.

      What isn’t said, but is crucial in order to understand his behavior, is that if he were to report it, police would have to block off the entire field as they searched for evidence; moreover, the body of a dead transgender woman found on their land would certainly destroy his mother’s political career. It is up to him to find a way to get rid of the body.

      He first, he attempts to employ the help of a friend from whom he earlier obtained a steroid injection to build up his muscles. But the strange way that Cristiano describes what he wants the friend to help him accomplish confuses and frightens him, and sends the friend on the run. Eventually after a few drinks in the club, Cristiano finds another acquaintance, perhaps a trusted employee, to take the trip with him to Field No. 4, where the body lies.

     But this time, the now drunk Cristiano’s invitation to show his friend something deeper in the field, is perceived by the older man as a sexual come-on. He seems willing to possibly provide his Cristiano with gratification, even gently stroking his hand for a moment as he takes the beer bottle passed to him. But the idea of going out into the dark beanfields for gay sex is something he is not willing to do. And when Cristiano leaves the car by himself, he attempts to call him back to the auto—willing perhaps to give him a blow job, but not willing to follow him into the dark.

      All of these bits of information which make meaning of Marcheti’s oblique tale, are left unsaid, as if the director expects his audience to either make meaning of the strange world in which he has suddenly placed them, or simply treat it as a mysterious land without logic into which they have entered, the way a visitor to Mato Gross would have to deal with the place and its inhabitants.

      Even what finally happens to the body is left open to question, as the drunken Cristiano discovers a kind of nightmarish world facing him, the large harvesters coming toward him along with the futuristic drones. We leave him stumbling along the large leafy soybeans confused and seemingly unable to right the situation.

      The only way we know he has fixed it up is that a few days later four friends of Madalena visit her house and pack away her belongings, each of them taking one or more of her possessions in memory of the woman whose death has now, evidently, been publicly confirmed. There is a sense of the inevitable in all of this. As the film announces almost as a coda, just before the credits: “Brazil has the highest number of transsexual murders in the world.”

       The friends, one of them who self-identifies as a butch dyke, another who seems to be gay male, and other two who may be either transgender or heterosexual women, Bianca and Francine, the latter the one who Luziane hinted to about seeing the ghost of their mutual friend Madalena, gather, in a different configuration, a couple of days later to take a short voyage to what now appears to have been the place where the police or others found Madalena’s body, a nearby river.

       Recalling brief stories about their life with Madalena, mostly about her utter drunkenness, they gather at the river, swim, laugh, speak of their own dreams and failures, and remember their friend the best they can. Bianca, who has taken a necklace from Madalena’s house, sends it on its way down stream in the flow as a personal sacred gesture. And in the last frames of this film all one hears is the plash of the water and its endless underflow.

       We learn no more of these women, not even their sexual identities, than we knew of Luziane and Cristiano, both of who have dropped out of sight for the third and final act. And we know these people of the city crowded against the endless green fields of soy with its rows after rows of small two room tract houses that have been built for the agricultural employees and their families This is not our world, or evidently, since most of the citizens work as virtual farm slaves, theirs either.

     In its paternal heteronormative order in which little concern is given to the private feelings, actions, racial heritage, or the sexualities of the masses; deviation of any kind has become suspect, and the order of the day is that of the traditional land owners such as Cristiano’s father. The crop is all that matters, and just as the female workers in the local canning company, everyone is expected to show up at work or lose their jobs. The only outlet that the young men and women have is the club, and a few places like it. This is not a world welcome to obvious deviators such as Madalena or other LGBTQ+ individuals, in general. Given its social structures, regions like Mato Grasso are, in fact, hostile to such beings and makes little space for them in its society. Closed social orders, as we learn time and again, are often the source of deep violence.

       Killing off the many forms of individuation as it has, this is truly a world of absences, of ghosts. No one here dares to openly reveal themselves, not even the landowner’s son. Why we wonder, after the fact, was Cristiano attempting to develop something like the overdeveloped muscles of his friend? Certainly, given his wealth, any woman would be attracted to him. Just perhaps he is seeking to appeal to his own gender, but is unable to express the fact to anyone, not even himself.

 

Los Angeles, July 1, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).