Neighbouring Sounds (2013)

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.

The snappishness of Filho's ensemble–who
tentatively share a street in the south of Recife, one of Brazil's
highest-density metropolitan areas–is all the more alarming because there isn't
a grotesque among them. The nominal lead is João (Gustavo Jahn), a real estate
agent trying to clear off a condo that's recently seen its tenant jump to her
death, presumably in front of the lower-class neighbour kid whose soccer ball
is always getting stuck in someone's balcony. Despite the patronizing way
he wears his wealth, sympathizing with the maid on account of he, too, once had to
take a job as a student, João is our most natural audience surrogate,
especially next to high-strung, new-moneyed mother Bia (Maeve Jinkings), who
divvies up her day conceiving of ways to incapacitate the neighbour's barking
guard dog, clandestinely smoking pot in the laundry room (then vacuuming the
smoke out of her mouth), and shuttling her kids off to English and Mandarin
classes. Bia isn't exactly sympathetic, but she's recognizable as more than a
type, someone who's trying to square her goal for her children to become
citizens of the world with her natural misanthropy. Even the community's
silver-haired patriarch Francisco (W.J. Solha), a smiling tyrant who banally
informs a visiting security start-up that he owns pretty well the entire
neighbourhood, is just a man doing his work on some level, keeping his family
in line.

It's the security team, a group of strangers
entering an already guarded community with the promise of even more scrupulous
surveillance via some truly low-tech digital cameras, that snaps Filho's
seemingly shaggy work into narrative and thematic focus. Like a more stately
version of his onscreen doppelgängers, Filho's camera follows these neighbours
with spooky precision in widescreen compositions that often give way to
startling close-ups, tracing their steps as they follow the sounds that pollute
their space to the source. There's a studied playfulness to the way Filho turns
these diegetic signs of people inhabiting their shared environment–a symphony
of mechanical noises ranging from the cool glide of roller blades on pavement
to the deep rumble of Bia's washing machine, obliterating everything around it–into
a percussive soundtrack.

Impressive as his design is, there's a worrying
hint of Alejandro González Iñárritu to Filho's final twist, an unfortunate turn
given how studiously the rest of the film rejects the Iñárritu school of
crisscrossing narrative that has poisoned ensemble filmmaking since Amores
Perros. It isn't that this late reveal, which also
resembles the cryptic historical guilt-mongering of Haneke's Caché, is a cheat: There are plenty of hints throughout of
a racially-coded underclass ready to storm the gates of this cushy
neighbourhood, from the unidentified black teen who, in one moment straight out
of a slasher, races past the camera and out of the apartment he's been
squatting in to the uncannily-staged nightmare of Bia's well-heeled daughter,
who dreams of a mass of dark young bodies scaling her apartment's fence to
crowd around under her window like hungry wolves. But those moments are
faithful renditions of the garrison mentality run wild, where the ending is
more of an exclamation point at the end of a finely-wrought sentence that doesn't
need it.

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