O som ao redor ***½/**** starring Gustavo Jahn, Maeve Jinkings, W.J. Solha, Irma Brown written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
by Angelo Muredda In his 1975 survey of
trends in Canadian literature, Northrop Frye famously diagnosed the national
character as paranoiac, fraught with nightmares about being invaded by the
outside world. That so-called garrison mentality, Frye offered, meant early
white Canadian settlers bonded together against both the malevolent nature past
their forts and the more generalized outside threats it represented--shutting
their doors to anyone who seemed the slightest bit unneighbourly. Although Frye had a
very specific community in mind, it's hard not to see it reflected in the
gated neighbourhood of critic-turned-filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighbouring
Sounds, a conclave of middle-class northern Brazilian
condo-dwellers who define themselves by the riffraff they discard, whether
car-stereo thieves or sleeping doormen. Part-Hanekian surveillance thriller and
part-Altmanesque ensemble of overlapping voices, it's one of the most assured
debut features to land in years, the sort of fully-formed high-concept work you
expect after a couple of interesting misfires.
Tropa de Elite 2 - O Inimigo Agora É Outro ***/**** starring Wagner Moura, Irandhir Santos, Andre Ramiro, Milhelm Cortaz screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani & José Padilha directed by José Padilha
by Angelo Muredda Early in Elite Squad - The Enemy Within (hereafter The Enemy Within) José Padilha's blustery follow-up to his 2007 hit Elite Squad, deluxe cop Lt. Colonel Nascimento (Wagner Moura, Brazil's answer to Mark Ruffalo) promises to give us a history of Rio that happens to coincide with his life story. It's a tall order, but Padilha and co-screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani are ambitious and foolish enough to undertake it, returning to the favelas they brought to boot-stomping life in the first Elite Squad while shifting focus this time from drug lords to corrupt cops. No one would call their work subtle, but they strike a surprisingly watchable balance between Goodfellas-type insider confessional and incendiary political exposé, ditching the tight timeframe and local scope of the original and going for a more sprawling survey of Rio as Hell on Earth. Yet as much as The Enemy Within deserves solemn back-pats for its anaesthetized, everybody's-guilty project, it really takes off in brutally violent set-pieces that forgo neutrality. Cut loose from his earnest ambitions to tell an ambivalent political fable that clucks its tongue equally at anti-poverty activists and conservative law-and-order types, Padilha shows his directorial hand in testosterone-charged gunfights where either all the right people get shot or all the good ones go down as martyrs, and it's the hand of a vigilante sympathizer drawn to the romance of man-to-man violence. Fascist? No doubt. But as ideologically suspect apologies for rogue justice go, this one's pretty well-executed, and at times just plain more fun than the hemming and hawing of The Dark Knight.
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