Highlights of Los Angeles Brazilian Film Festival (LABRFF) 2023
Posted By Robin Menken
Flavio Ermírio’s “Tree House” is a slow simmering psychological horror piece, well-cast and beautifully mounted. Real chemistry between the leads Dora (Cristiane Wersom) and Mateus (Pedro Bosnich)
is the spine of this post-modern“Rappaccini’s Daughter (Nathaniel Hawthorne).
Hugo Prata's "Angela" is a portrait of 70's Brazilian socialite and free spirit Ângela Diniz, who became famous after she was murdered at her beach house in Praia dos Ossos, Búzios by her lover, Raul Fernandes do Amaral ('Doca') Street.
One of the most talked about murders in Brazil, the femicide sparked important feminist protests.
In the 1970's "Crimes of Passion" were treated very leniently by the courts. if the husband claimed "defense of his honor". Amaral ('Doca') Street was sentenced to only two years of imprisonment claiming "legitimate defense of honor".
Feminist “Lovers Don’t Kill,” protests pressured the justice system. The court finally eliminated Amaral ('Doca') Street's defense of honor claim. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the horrific crime. After release from prison he monetized his heinous crime “Mea Culpa: The Testimony That Breaks 30 Years of Silence.”
Even after her death Angela was criticized for the number of affairs she had in her life and for divorcing her husband at a time when it was uncommon.
Prata's film focuses on the tumultuous four-month affair leading to the tragedy. Giving Angela a long overdue emotional "day in court", Prata avoids showing the crime, rather focusing on Angela's frantic partying fueled by the separation from her children. Her "shamed" husband agreed to sign the divorce papers if she gave him custody of their three children. That was the cruel price she paid for her freedom.
Isis Valverde (Angela) and Gabriel Braga Nunes (Raul) star in this well-mounted bio pic.
In August 2006, a statute against domestic and gender violence (the “Maria da Penha Law”) went into effect in Brazil...a turning point for how the Brazilian legal system treats women and gender-based violence.
"Tia Virginia" ("Aunt Virginia") is an absurdist dark comedy about family.
Christmas Eve is the occasion for a family reunion.
Spinster Aunt Virginia (Vera Holtz) bears the responsibility for caring for her catatonic mother, living with her in the family home. (Brazil's 60s' super model
Vera Valdez plays the stone-faced matriarch.)
Using the excuse of their busy lives, her two married sisters Vanda (Arlete Salles) and Valquíria (Louise Cardoso) insisted she leave her bohemian single life to move in with their mother. (Virginia's unfulfilled dream was to become an actress.)
Brisk Urbane Valquiria show up with her alcoholic layabout son (Iuri Saraiva). Blind to his faults, she praises him as a paragon, though he is busy hitting on Virginia's live-out maid, who rebuffs his unwanted advances.
Vanda arrives with her husband (suffering dementia), played by Antônio Pitanga, and her daughter, played by Daniela Fontan, Vanda she spends her time pining for her absent son and waiting for his International call.
Niece Daniela is the only one who cares for Virginia and Virginia dotes on her, preparing a special rice dish for her, though everyone else in the family hates it.
Vanda and Valquiria agree on one thing, they treat the house as their own, moving benighted Virginia into the tiny maid's room and later firing her neccesary day helper.
Virginia's eccentric spinster-dom render her a pathetic helper in their eyes, transforming her sacrifice into a favor they did her to secure her a temporary bourgeois home.
Art Director Ana Mara Abreu made the family home an important character, filling the house with luxurious antiques, designer furniture, exquisite glasses and porcelain. DP Leonardo Feliciano's cinematography allows the house to comment on Virginia's life as in teh morning ritual of hand-winding the antique clock
Inventive Virginia interacts with her mother, ignoring her lack of response. She conducts one-way conversations, asks her opinions. Perhaps she's in denial or perhaps she feels its therapeutic.
The arrival of her two sisters wakes Virginia from her familiar home rituals, ultimately inspiring her liberation.
The rest of the clan treat impassive Mother as a thing. ("Her room smells of pee") or as prop for insincere confessionals.
As the film proceeds it becomes a chamber piece of raw familial bitterness and resentment, played by three accomplished actresses. Arlete Salles and Louise Cardoso give wonderful performances. Vera Holtz is marvel of nuance and the heartbeat of the film.
Tensions play out. Director Fábio Meira plays a climactic scene off camera as decades of resentments flare up violently.
The Christmas dinner is highjacked by Virginia, who appears in her graduation dress. (She's been decorating it throughout the film) .
Despite previous revelations about greedy plans for their inheritance, hypocritical Vanda and Valquíria perform what is expected, Valquíria begins a sanctimonious speech about family.
Virginia turns up the record player and begins to dance to Ravel's Bolero. The force of her personality transforms her amateur steps into something powerful. As the family sits by dumbfounded, Virginia unleashes her plan for their future, releasing the cinema audience from complicitous tension and preparing her own victory.
Sérgio Machado’s “River Of Desire” is set in Amazonas.
Based on Amazonian writer Milton Hatoum's short story, “The Commander's Farewell”, the regional melodrama juggles themes from Greek Tragedy.
Police Captain Dalberto (Daniel Oliveira) meets Anaíra (Sophie Charlotte) when he’s called to the site of a domestic violence. Gorgeous Anaíra stabbed her abusing stepfather.
Dalberto and Anaira are thunderstruck. Sexual desire flares up and they are inseparable. Both sick of their lives, they decide to marry. He quits the force, takes a loan on the family photo business, called Three Brothers.
It’s the sole inheritance left to Dalberto, photographer Dalmo (Rômulo Braga) and musician Armando (Gabriel Leone) after their father’s recent death.
Dalberto brings Anaira to live in the family home.
As typical in classic Drama, woman is the lure, the temptation. Female sexual betrayal is an unforgiveable wound, men’s cheating is par for the course
The three brothers grew up with their absentee father and a house keeper. Their beautiful mother ran off to the big city with a gringo.
Anaíra reminds each of them of their longed for, missing mother- the unobtainable care giver and love object. Anaira, meanwhile, has a tragic subtext of her own: the child of abuse at the hands of her stepfather.
All of this Oedipal subtext is kindling for a desperate familial round robin of frustrated desire.
Sophie Charlotte is a nymph, a force of nature, but we are spared titillating shots of her body, rather the camera lingers on the faces of the smitten men . Performances are strong throughout.
DP Adrian Teijido’s exquisite cinematography of dawn, sunset, and evening makes the film a tropical fever dream. Set in the river town of Itacoatiara, and along the Amazon all the way to Iquitos, the timeless fable uses images of encroaching globalization to give the film a topical bite.
Sophie Charlotte also stars in Meu Nome E Gal, the bio pic about pop icon Gal Costa's early radical Tropicalia.
days.
