The story of a fictional town under siege is a blunt political allegory
IN 2018, when Jair Bolsonaro won Brazil’s presidential election, outside observers feared that his proposed public-spending cuts would hurt the country’s creative sector—particularly the film industry, which relies on state funding and tax incentives. Mr Bolsonaro has already subsumed the ministry of culture into a more general “ministry of citizenship”, but the full effects of his policies are yet to be felt.
Set in the near future, “Bacurau” opens in a fictional separatist and self-sufficient town of that name in Brazil’s mountainous interior. The inhabitants live mostly in harmony, sharing resources, paying their respects when a beloved elderly matriarch dies and taking it in turns to keep watch over the only road to the outside world.
Most ominous is the arrival in Bacurau of a paramilitary group. Tellingly, they hail not from Brazil but from America. They could be hired mercenary forces or, as their amateurish behaviour indicates, tourists who want to hunt humans for sport. But the distinction hardly matters: they behave as racist psychopaths, lusting for blood and taking pleasure in their kill counts. When they can’t find anyone else to shoot, they shoot each other.
as Brazil’s political climate darkened, to match an atmosphere that Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, the film-makers, have described as “like a dystopia”. The president has said that left-wing “outlaws” should “be banished from our homeland”, but “Bacurau” makes heroes of outlaws, redefining the relationship between individuals, their homeland and the nation that claims them.
Such themes are familiar from Mr Filho’s two previous narrative features, “Neighboring Sounds” and “Aquarius” , which told stories of opposition to the encroachment of modernity in the Brazilian coastal community of Recife. “Bacurau” is less driven by human drama, preferring as it does the surreal violence of a genre movie.
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