FILM REVIEW: ONCE UPON A TIME, VERONICA By: Faiz No comments

Veronica (Hermila Guedes) and Gustavo (Joao Miguel) in Once Upon a Time, Veronica.

Examining a life worth living

By Ed Rampell

Despite its fairy tale title, Brazilian writer-director ​Marcelo Gomes’ Once Upon a Time, Veronica is a realistic look at contemporary urban South America. What’s engrossing about this film is that it takes viewers behind the scenes into the psyche and even soul of its protagonist, Veronica da Silva Fernandes (Hermila Guedes). Who are these women? By going beyond the celluloid stereotypes of countless Carmen Miranda movies, 1959’s mythic Black Orpheus, etc., and revealing Veronica’s inner life, we have a fully fleshed out picture of a 21^stcentury women living in Recife, on Brazil’s northeastern coast.

Much of the truthfully drawn film is concerned with Veronica’s private life; its nudity and sex acts are fairly graphic by puritanical Yankee standards, where couples often make love beneath blankets. But our heroine is far more than a beach blanket bimbo or just another “hot Latin Lover.” In fact, Veronica is a doctor, with much of this feature detailing her work inside of a city hospital and the related stresses of trying to treat, and perhaps heal, psychologically suffering patients (some of whom abuse Veronica).

In the classic “physician heal thyself” mode, Veronica, too experiences existential angst and ponders the meaning of life, so she is often simpatico with her clientele. In this sense, Once Upon a Time, Veronica is reminiscent of European sixties cinema by Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, with those estranged characters seeking purpose and connection. As developing countries undergo development, part of the process seems to incur these psychological crises that once seemed reserved for we denizens of the developed world, with our materialistic, consumer societies. One could find analogy to adding to global warming -- welcome to the monkey house!

Veronica finds release from her daily grind in carefree sex and water. Whether romping in the surf (alone or with friends or as part of an orgy) or in her shower, water is a recurring motif that provides our heroine with a form of hydrotherapy. Perhaps it can be argued that the sea in particular is what connects Veronica most to her Brazilian-ness.

As for her sexuality, Veronica confides that her problem isn’t having sex or finding partners, but rather discovering true love. So there’s a conflict as to whether Gustavo (Joao Miguel) will remain solely a sex partner, her boy toy -- or, on a more intimate level, become Veronica’s “official boyfriend.”

Perhaps this is because Veronica still lives with her ailing, aging father, Zé Maria (W. J. Solha) -- who loves frevo music and has a book by Lenin on his shelf -- with whom she has a very warm, nurturing relationship. Maybe she’s channeling those loving feelings into her father, instead of a romantic partner. (Paging Dr. Freud!)

Guedes’ performance always rings true. Her Veronica is not a classic beauty; rather, her attractiveness is derived from the character’s realistic earthiness. Veronica is physically (and mentally) poised somewhere between youth, which is fading, and the onset of early middle age; she’s apparently around 35 years old or so. Indeed, the film begins with Veronica sitting her medical exams, as she transitions from student to entering the workplace as a professional.

Veronica is busty, but beginning to sag -- you know, like a real woman, not a pre-fab Hollywood movie starlet. In a sense, sans (presumably) Botox, breast augmentation surgery and other artifice, we experience a natural instead of artificial woman, which makes her all the more sexier and endearing. Likewise some of Veronica’s gal pals -- one of whom is very overweight but not burdened by Melissa McCarthy-type fat girl jokes.

Gomes combines Neo-realist and more arty cinematic styles, with lots of close-ups. We get a real slice of life as it seems to be lived by 21^st century real residents of Recife. But a shot that lingers on Veronica’s grief stricken visage goes on far too long and one almost wants to shout “cut!” at the screen at this affectation.

Overall, Once Upon a Time, Veronica is a candid, absorbing film that sheds light on 21^st century Brazil through the life of a vibrant, bright woman full of longing, striving for hope -- and, perhaps, an insouciant state of grace that is joie de vivre. 

 

FILM REVIEW: LULA, SON OF BRAZIL By: Faiz No comments

A scene from Lula, Son of Brazil.

Rise for the classes

By Ed Rampell

In the past few years a slew of biopics about recent European rightwing leaders have been released, including The Conquest (about Nicolas Sarkozy’s rise to France’s presidency), The Iron Lady (with Meryl Streep as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), The Queen (about Queen Elizabeth and Britain’s sellout and warmonger, Prime Minister Tony Blair), as well as Il Caimano, which lampoons Italy’s buffoonish Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Now there’s a feature to cheer for about one of the good guys, as Fabio Barreto’s Lula, Son of Brazil joins Clint Eastwood’s ode to Nelson Mandela, Invictus, as a biopic about a left-leaning leader.

This stylish, stirring, poignant picture follows Luis Inacio Lula da Silva from his birth and humble origins in Brazilian hinterlands to his migration to the urban squalor of São Paolo’s favelas. Lula is real salt of the Earth, a man of the people, who during his childhood was a shoeshine boy and fruit peddler. His father is a ne’er-do-well who deserts the family, although his mother, Dona Lindu (Gloria Pires) is a loving, nurturing, encouraging pillar of strength. Several actors portray Lula from childhood to adulthood, and newcomer Rui Ricardo Diaz incarnates the grownup metal worker as he rises in the ranks of the trade union movement that challenges the factory bosses and Brazil’s military dictatorship. Like Mandela, Lula becomes a political prisoner (albeit for a far shorter time than his South African counterpart) who eventually became head of state.

Along the way, Lula endures personal tragedy and loss, as well as public struggles against the military regime. Sequences of factory strikes, occupations, rallies, demonstrations and government crackdowns are shot with cinematic verve and gusto by Gustavo Hadba, and reminded me of 1969’s Z, the Costa-Gavras classic about the Greek colonels’ coup that won the Best Foreign Film Oscar. However, Barreto and his cinematographer Hadba also have keen eyes for filmically rendered, often exquisite close-ups that bring viewers into the drama.

It is this balance of the political and the personal, in terms of film form and content, that makes Lula, Son of Brazil so gripping. The private family and romantic elements are organically linked to the mass drama – just as they are in real life, too. Like the moving father-son relationship in A Better Life, the mother-son relationship between Lula and Lindu is extremely touching, and of course emphasizes how parenting is the most important job in the world. This is one of the best silver screen depictions of a mother-son relationship set against a social backdrop since V.I. Pudovkin’s 1926 Soviet revolutionary silent masterpiece, Mother, based on Maxim Gorky’s novel.

The acting has a neo-realist flavor to it in the sense that a working class milieu is truthfully depicted, although most of the lead parts are played by professional actors. Diaz, an unknown, had theatre training; this turn in the title role of an epic is his first film role. In addition to Diaz and Pires, Cleo Pires as Lula’s first wife Lurdes and Sostenes Vidal as Ziza, the brother who is to the left of Lula, also excel. Cleo is the real life daughter of Gloria, a telenovela star who also acted in 1995’s O Quatrilho, an Oscar-nominated drama directed by Barreto.

Politically, Lula, Son of Brazil depicts its proletarian protagonist as an honest trade union militant who repeatedly asserts that he is not “a communist.” Lula was more or less a social democrat, and the successful Workers Party candidate for president in post-dictatorship Brazil ruled the country in that way. While he was part of the Bolivarian trend of left-leaning South American leaders portrayed in 2010’s great Oliver Stone documentary South of the Border, he is clearly not as radical as his counterparts in Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela. However, after serving two terms in office he reportedly reduced poverty, left Brazil better off than he’d found it before becoming president, remained immensely popular, and handed the presidency off to a democratically elected woman and former guerrilla, Workers Party candidate Dilma Rousseff.

The movie’s final credits become propagandistic, with a hagiography of Lula consisting of titles telling boasting about his achievements and photos of him meeting with various world leaders. The transition from fiction to factual is jarring, and also strange, because the rest of the biopic has a far greater ring of truth. But this is a mere quibble; otherwise, Lula is a marvelous motion picture experience about a man and a movement that shook South America’s largest nation to its core. If you happen to love great movies, don’t miss Lula, Son of Brazil.