by Jason Adams
You think you know somebody. You think you've got it all figured out. You think you sit down to a movie at the New York Film Festival you're gonna see something respectable -- something serious and challenging. But hyper-violent revenge westerns? Those are for Toronto.
Well Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles' film Bacurau already played Toronto, and now it is playing NYFF, and it somehow splits the difference -- it's somehow an ass-blistering revenge fable with exploding heads, while also being a deadly serious story of an indigenous community terrorized by big business interests. It is, quite simply, the sort of movie we'll look back on from the future -- assuming there is a future -- and say, "Yup, that got it just right..."
The town of the title sits in the middle of nowhere, Brazil. The people have somehow cobbled together a community, seemingly built out of the stones and clay and scrub-brush, and they seem happy enough -- they have lots of complaints, mostly due to bloviating politicians and outside forces interrupting their way of life. But they have those complaints together, and there's nothing that brings people together like common sources of outrage.
Unfortunately for Bacurau and all these folks in there, their town in the middle of nowhere is right in the way of somewhere -- of what it's unclear, perhaps a pipeline, perhaps lands to mine. Whatever the case the powers that be have dropped a great big target down on the town, and a team of mostly foreign mercenaries -- including a team leader played with typical B-Movie panache by the legend Udo Kier -- have descended, cut off the exits, and are prepared to scrub that brush of every living thing in it.
Bacurau is a 21st century Spaghetti Western with drones and cell signal blockers coming up against good old fashioned machetes and big ass holes in the ground, and it's the most spirited, stand up from your seat and cheer flick I have seen this entire year. It works because it knows outrage in its bones, and feels it for us, and blows it back like brain matter. Sonia Braga, re-teaming with her Aquarius team, leads the charge and enters the movie an appropriate whirlwind, but this is very much a team effort and Bacurau, a sand-blasted scofflaw place, is a joint you can root for.
Bacurau plays tonight, October 1st at 8:45 PM and tomorrow night October 2nd at 6:00 PM. Both screenings followed by a Q&A with the director and Sonia Braga