The people of Bacurau, a small, fictional town in the backcountry of Northeastern Brazil, have problems—though, to be clear, the people themselves are not the problem.
It’s everyone, everything else. The matriarch of the village, the 96-year-old Carmelita, has died, and though it has not lessened the village’s resolve—if anything, it proves opportunity for more cohesion—it feels of a piece with Bacurau’s ongoing travails. The people here are happy, familial, full of tradition—no strangers to love and enchantment. But nor are they strangers to disenfranchisement.
For one thing, the presiding political powers have cut off the region’s access to water. Vaccines—polio, snake venom—need to be smuggled in as, by contrast, the community is flooded with addictive painkillers meant, one suspects, to dull the village’s wits into political submission. The schools are decrepit, a problem to which the mayor—a witlessly ineffectual vote-grubber with no honor or ethics—responds by hauling a dump truck full of books into town and pouring them out into the dirt like so much rubbish. There are local heros, legendary vigilantes with Old West swagger, furious and perhaps even capable enough to do something about this. But one, known as La Lunga, is on the run. The other, Pacote, has illusions of leaving that life behind.
Which—bad as this all is—is nonetheless an explainable set of phenomena. But what about the other problems—the frightened stampede of horses in the night, for example, or the strange tourists on motorbikes with colorful outfits, city accents, and strange questions? There’s that strange something in the sky, too—an unidentifiable who-knows-what—that’s been flitting around the periphery of the village. And then there’s the disappearance, not of a person, but of Bacurau itself: it’s been removed from the map.
If you’re not intrigued by now, I have no remedy. I also, wary of spoiling more, have few answers for you. Bacurau, co-written and -directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (Aquarius, Neighboring Sounds) and Juliano Dornelles, is an ingenious mashup of American westerns and the satirical and political work that swept Brazilian cinema in the 1960s, by the likes of Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. It is a classic of the “weird western” genre, that Frankenstein mode of storytelling in which the mythic heroics and visual tropes of the western get mixed with some other genre—the classic example of this, for American audiences, being the cyberpunk-inflected Wild Wild West franchise.
Bacurau signals from the start that its attitude is playful in this regard. It’s full of wipes and overtly stylish zooms and other bits of corny film language that only make it more fun, more vivid—its politics all the more cutting for being hitched to such a thrilling, cathartically violent vehicle. What impresses, in the end, are the tensions between what’s constant—the community, its rituals, its complex but humane sense of social order—and the political abrasions the film subjects them to, humiliations that necessarily attract all manner of comparison to Brazil’s current political situation while also, bit by bit, defying those analogies through insistent strangeness.
This is undeniably a film about a community fighting back. Its stars—Bárbara Colen, Thomas Aquino (who plays Pacote), Sônia Braga (who plays the fiery doctor Domingas), and others—sew the broader community of actors, a good number of them non-professional, into a genuine force. The realism of the film creeps in when we study the community’s faces—the looks exchanged when, for example, the mayor and his hoods grab a sex worker against her will and another Bacurau woman issues a firm reminder: “Whores vote, too.”