Leon Cakoff, from Venice, for Jornal da Mostra
Edited by Renata de Almeida and Leon Cakoff
The Constant Gardener, the first film
with Fernando Meirelles as director after the success worldwide
of City of God, caused a great impact at
the end of the first viewing of the film, classified as
competition at the 62nd Venice Film Festival. This was at
the session for the benefit of the press where the audience
were unanimous in applause and superlative comments.
Meirelles is true to the style of the fragmented edition
of his last film - most pleasing to the critics - with the
same tense structure and, at the same time, much to the
taste of audiences as a thriller that speaks out against
the pharmaceutical industry, more concerned with shareholder
profit than with saving human lives. Venice, in the last
days, reached a consensus, an excellent panoramic view of
cinema that will surely be news in the second half of 2005.
And The Constant Gardener will undoubtedly
be at the center of attention.
Once again, Fernando Meirelles shows that cinema schooled
by the publicity industry, much richer than authoral cinema,
may serve for the good.
Meirelles' partner in City of God, Kátia
Lund, also came off well in Venice with her episode, Bilu
& João, in the film All the
Invisible Children. The film is extremely sad,
however, not appellative, and is imbued with dignity. She
also came across with the same language of nervous narrative
that brought her renown worldwide with City of God,
making the drama of two children who sort recyclable garbage
in the streets of São Paulo a universal theme and
coming off well with her episode, side by side with revered
talent, such as Emir Kusturica and Spike Lee.
In the "Orizzonti" section, Venice awarded greater
applause to a Brazilian feature Arido Movie,
set against the desert landscape of the dry, violent northeast
of Brazil, of great visual impact and with splendid photography
in sepia, by the film maker and producer of the film, Murilo
Salles. Urban drugged youngsters in search of a paradise
in the Pernambuco marijuana plantations trigger a nervous
cultural shock with the secular tradition of the northeast
of Brazil in this voyage in time that affords several readings
and interpretations. At the center of the narrative is the
weatherman whose focus, in a television program, is primarily
directed to the cycles of rainfall in the southeastern cities
of Brazil. He is traveling to the funeral of his father,
unknown to him and a roué. The cycle of violence
and centuries-old vengeance between plantation owners and
those they exploit, runs parallel to the inevitable mysticism
that is classically generated by this poverty-stricken environment
arrested in time.
Shown incomprehensibly hors concours in the program for
a selection of short films, Venice also gave credit to a
moving short film De Glauber para Jirges,
by André Ristum. Scenes of the time, photographic
fragments, and images from the unconscious make up this
beautiful afresco on Brazil in the seventies, with letters
from exile and hope from creative delirium to political
impressions between mythical film maker Glauber Rocha and
his close collaborator Jirges Ristum, who was then living
in Rome. The most moving of all is to see the past materialize,
with extreme care, in a film made by the son of Jirges Ristum.
Translation into English: Clare Elizabeth Charity (clarecharity@uol.com.br)
