CARNIVAL IS OVER (Photo Credit: Helena Barreto)
You know a film has grand ambitions, mayhap delusions of grandeur, when it opens with two extensive title cards setting up a mythos and cast of characters you'll need to follow to make sense of what's to come. Carnival Is Over wants to ensure the audience understands the century-old Animal Game, a clandestine lottery controlled by the "bicheiros" of Rio de Janeiro. Bask in this sense of legacy, for it's about to be upturned as a crisis of power blossoms within the crime lord's syndicate. It all starts with the return of a prodigal son from abroad, a year after his father's suspicious death. Valério is the heir's name, but you might as well call him Hamlet. Or perhaps Macbeth. Later in the narrative, he'll even play a little Titus Andronicus…
Writer-director Fernando Coimbra has arranged a Shakespearean mixtape, playing fast and loose with some of the Bard's most famous and bloodiest stories before putting them through a Brazilian crime movie philter. The result is a mixed bag but unlike many a fall festival title, it actually improves as it unravels. Unfortunately, the first hour after those portentous text blocks is a bit of a mess, especially from a formal point of view. Opening shot and chaser excluded, the compositions are sloppy, as if working for a televisual rather than big screen scale. The marvelous sets created by Caio Costa and Rafael Torah are done dirtier by this than any of the actors. However, like most players in Carnival is Over, they'll find a kind of justice by the tragedy's end.
Before we get there, however, one must meet this Valério, a gloomy non-entity who only seems to come alive when enacting the role of a rapist home invader in the sexual roleplay games he performs with Regina, the movie's attempt at reshaping Lady Macbeth for the 21st century. Like the Scottish schemer of 16th-century theater, this Brazilian queen drips poison in her husband's ear, pushing him toward a bid for power that'll leave a few dead bodies rotting on the floor. Or between walls, for Valério and Regina's first victim is to be Linduarte, his brutish uncle whom a ghostly hallucination accuses of killing his own brother. In a film for which subtlety is a foreign language, Carnival is Over is uncharacteristically coy about the phantasm's message.
CARNIVAL IS OVER (photo credit: Junior Malta)
Either way, Linduarte's fate is sealed. One night, the two conspirators beckon the older man to their manor, a skeletal edifice undergoing renovation, and do away with him. The deed isn't seen, only heard, but, like Regina, we're made to stare at the blood painting the walls an accusatory crimson. Such stains will haunt her as one might expect, whether real or imagined, a physical mark or a guilty conscience manifesting a nightmare into the world. They hide the corpse in the space between walls, bricking it shut and out of sight. Only the smell escapes, along with the fluids of decay. They seep through, even as the wreck of a house turns palatial and pristine. Regina is especially unnerved.
She might be ruthless, but the new king's consort isn't used to the violence of the family business or how casually it's dispensed. The burden of the crime weighs on her, pressing down into paranoia. Leandra Leal, who starts the film in the heights of melodrama is quick to succumb to constant terror, shattering her characterization long before the curtain closes on Regina's kingdom of carnage. She's better off than Irandhir Santos, who does little to make Valério interesting beyond his kinky persona. Thank heavens that illusion of darkness comes to supersede his outward demeanor, curdling into something sinister that goes far beyond bedroom theater.
He still sometimes fades in the background of scenes he's meant to dominate, but there could be worse fates than that. Costa and Torah's work is exquisite, taking the main house through various gradations of destruction and renewal, imbuing the docks with a theatrical absurdity, and even finding the chill airs of a glass mausoleum within the police station. When Coimbra starts to pull back his camera in the second half, those spaces can sing their glory. And so can Júnior Malta's cinematography, suddenly rich with shadow and transforming lights, eager to turn dusk to dawn with a nifty trick, turn the whole affair into a gothic romance teetering on the edge of pitch-black comedy.
When he's on, Coimbra is on fire. Even his propensity to borrow from the Bard gains some sophistication as he looks for the expressivity of the weather, a storming Greek chorus that reminds one of Julius Caesar. Still, his piece de resistance is in the late-coming stabs at thriller filmmaking. Restraint and discipline surge through Carnival Is Over in such moments, so robust they might make you forget all the stumbles to get there. In the original Portuguese title, the film's title means the "Hanged Ones," which reflects how the characters spend their narrative braiding the ropes that will snap their necks. Coimbra spends the same journey undoing the knot he started the film wearing.