Jornal da Mostra
Nº 361 > 28ª Mostra > 13/09/2005
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Venice 2005 BRAZILIAN CINEMA DOES WELL AT THE FESTIVAL
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.
