NIGHT STAGE aka ATO NOTURNO*** - BFI Flare Closing Night Gala

NIGHT STAGE is a visually stylish and heavily Brian de Palma influenced queer erotic thriller about two men who sabotage their professional achievements with increasingly exhibitionist sex.  Gabriel Faryas plays Matias, a twenty something actor who is flamboyantly out but so ambitious that he's willing to shaft his own friend, colleague and room-mate to land the role in a major TV series. Casting directors and colleagues give him coded warnings about his public persona and he seems to buy into that but for his affair with Rafael (Cirillo Luna).  Rafael is a closeted politician on the cusp of becoming city mayor.  He has a bland "change" message but is in fact bankrolled by old school real estate developers and has a goon who serves as bodyguard and fixer.

The film is written and directed by Felipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon (SEASHORE) and they clearly have an assured visual eye. The actors all do a good job and the final message of the joy and relief of being out is a nuanced and tragic one.  But the film is about 20 minutes too long and it's never sinister enough in its thrills. The BFI Flare audience laughed uproariously at the appearance of a masked man.  To be fair, a lot of 80s and 90s thrillers of this type flirt with camp absurdity but I felt this went a bit too far. Also, I think it was pretty easy to guess the plot.  

NIGHT STAGE has a running time of 117 minutes. It played Berlin and closed BFI Flare 2025.

LINHA DE PASSE / PASSING LINE - earnest but dull Brazilian family drama

LINHA DE PASSE is an earnest film chronicling the lives of a poor family living in contemporary Sao Paolo. Sandra Corveloni plays the matriarch, Cleuza. She's a tough, caring woman, no longer with her husband, father of her three oldest boys. She also has illegitimate son, and another baby of unknown paternity on the way. Cleuza drinks and smokes through preganancy, attends soccer matches, and struggles to make a living. Her son Denis, a father himself, is a motorcycle courier who reluctantly turns to petty crime to escape poverty. The second son, Dinho, is trying to escape his shady past through religion. The third son, Dario, wants to escape through football but at 18 he's too old and he lacks the money to bribe the scout. The youngest, Reginaldo, spends his days riding buses, trying to work out who his father is.

The resulting film is well-acted and feels authentic. It's a non-glamourous story without any Hollywood endings. Poor people struggle, get frustrated, fail, but you never doubt the bond connecting the family.

Still, I have to say that I found the movie interminably dull. Yes, yes, it's earnest and it's great to see an unblinking slice of real life. But the odds stacked against our characters staying honest and the grim inevitability of the stories sucked any dramatic momentum out of the movie. I felt like I was being hit over the head with this unsubtle portrait of working-class horror and that the situations in which the characters found themselves were too conveniently symbolic of modern Brazil.

LINHA DE PASSE played Cannes, where Sandra Corveloni won Best Actress, and Toronto 2008. It opened earlier this month in Brazil and is currently on release in the UK. It opens in Israel on November 27th; in the Netherlands on January 22nd and in France on January 28th.

ELITE SQUAD / TROPA DE ELITE - The Pope's Rozzers

EL BANO DEL PAPA was a remarkaly discreet and affecting movie about the consequences of a Papal visit to Uruguay. With gallows humour and quiet humiliations it depicted a political system that is so inherently and completely corrupt that it both criminalises the poor and those in power.

ELITE SQUAD also tells the tale of a Papal visit to Latin America. When the Pope comes to Brazil in the 1990s, the government forms an elite squad of police, called the BOPE. They are meant to be ruthless and free from corruption, going into the favelas and taking out drug-dealers and pigs alike. The difference is that EL BANO DEL PAPA is a film with nuance and insight. ELITE SQUAD plays half like a loud music video and half like its trying to copy the visual style of the infinitely better CIDADE DE DEUS. It has a confused political message, and I get the feeling that the director doesn't really know how he wants us to feel about the BOPE.

On the one hand, the spoiled, pot-smoking, upper class sociology students say that everyone's a victim of the system. Rich and poor are born into endemic corruption. They argue that the BOPE are symptomatic of the complete breakdown of society - a group of fascist thugs who intimidate the rich and shoot the poor on sight and without judicial oversight. On the other hand, the BOPE, as symbolised by the narrator, Captain Nascimento, believe that they are doing right - that in a corrupt society they are the only people capable of restoring order. Moreover, they do so at substantial cost to their personal lives and sanity.

Director Jose Padilha is on tricky ground here. The BOPE have distinct fascist over-tones, complete with the SS style use of skulls on their insignia, the black uniforms, and the deliberate cultivation of an elite, cult-like mentality. On the other hand, he wants us to sympathise with them. It could've been a brilliant movie if it had truly pulled this off, and in the story of Andre Matias it almost does. Matias starts off as an idealistic law student who is shocked by police corruption and wants to do right. But by a series of small indistinguishable steps, Matias and his best friend Neto, slide into corruption and into the elite squad.

Sadly, this slide into fascist thuggery isn't as compelling as it should be because the frenetic shooting style and multi-linear narrative work against us seeing anything with clarity. Second, because, in the English-language release, the movie has been re-cut to put the focus on Nascimento rather than on Neto and Matias, using a deeply patronising voice-over. The voice-over, which continuously told me the obvious, had the effect of making me switch of my brain and disengage from the viewing experience.

ELITE SQUAD played Berlin 2008. It was released in Brazil in 2007 and in Argentina, Colombia, Turkey, the Netherlands, Mexico, Italy, Singapore, Portugal, Venezuela and Spain earlier in 2008. It is currently on release in Israel and the UK and is released next week in Hong Kong. It is released on September 4th in France and Greece and on September 19th in the USA.

Two overlooked music docs of the month - BRASILEIRINHO and DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY

Two very different music docs out on DVD. The first is a doc called BRASILERINHO from Finnish director (and brother of Aki) Mika Kaurismäki. For 90 minutes we get virtuosi Brazilian musicians playing choro - the prescursor of samba and the first truly Brazilian form of music. It combines European classical dance forms, complex inprovisation and counter-point, and African rhythem. At first we see small ensembles playing in concert halls - mostly guitars and mandolins. Slowly we add in tambourine players, brass players, singers and veen dancers, before a rousing big band finale. The documentary is evidently a labour of love and passion and the virtuosity of the musicians shines through. The quality of music is exceptional and the director has the good sense not to complicate matters with over-editing. What we do have is a very high quality sound mix (Uwe Dresch) and lensing (Jacques Cheuiche) that holds a steady close admiring view of the players. Because the doc does not spend too much time contextualising the music or imposing a narrative structure on the music, non music-buffs might be frustrated. For my part, this was a fascinating concert doc, and when it was over, Doc007 and I immediately went back and played our favourite tracks over. Perfect for a rare balmy London evening.

The second doc is DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY. This is a production that brims over with good-will - as befits a project wherein a super-rich comedian local-boy brings a bunch of world-class rap stars back home to Bed-Sty for a free street concert. There's enough of Dave Chappelle charming people into turning up and free-style riffing on stage for those of use who've never caught his Comedy Central show to realise what a good comedian he is. And there's enough concert footage for us to appreciate the musicianship. But the doc lacks the simple focus of BRASILEIRINHO - the sets are too short and the comedy too fleeting. I love Jill Scott and The Fugees and there simply wasn't enough of either! I'm also unconvinced by Michel Gondry and Ellen Kuras (DP)'s shooting style. The movie seems seems to unsettled - too choppy - and distracts from the musicians. Still, all of us waiting for that Fugees reunion will take what we can get.

BRASILEIRINHO played Berlin 2006 and was released in France and Belgium in 2005, in Finland and Hungary in 2006 and in the UK on March 23rd 2007. It is now available on DVD.

DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY played Toronto 2006 and Berlin 2006. It opened in the US, UK, Germany, France, Czach Republic, Greece, and Japan in 2006. It is available on DVD.

FAVELA RISING - like RIZE but for real, in Brazil and worse

Another week, another documentary about under-priveleged minorities escaping poverty and violence through organised youth groups specialising in music and dance. Here we have newbie documentary makers, Matt Mochary and Jeff Zimbalist, focusing on the work of Anderson Sa. Anderson is a good guy who escaped from drug-dealing in the favela/slums of Rio to become the leader of the Afro-Reggae band, and also the wider Afro-Reggae movement. Broadly speaking, he is the Tommy the Clown of Rio, luring kids from the camaradery and coolness of being a drug-lord (oh, yes!) into being part of his respected musical crew.

As far as it goes, that is a moderately interesting story. But you should not be suckered in by marketing claims that this is a companion piece to CITY OF GOD. It is far thinner on substance and social analysis, clearly much less technically accomplished, and far more manipulative. The quality of the transfer from digital to 35mm film is horrible. The contrast is so off that it really distracted me from watching the film. At first, I wondered if this was a deliberate effect but not so. The co-director, Mochary, boasted in an after-screening Q&A that film-makers should not be so obsessed with production values but find a good story. While I agree that substance is important, style also matters. Paying a little more attention to lighting in the sections filmed by the professional documentary-makers would have paid dividends. Granted the DV footage shot by the favela inhabitants themselves is going to be bad, but does the rest of the footage have to comply with this lowest technical common denominator?

But my really big objection is to the credulity of the film-makers. They bought into Anderson Sa's mythic status without questioning it one iota. Anderson Sa clearly is a very good man, but also a good self-publicist. He pumps up the Christian imagery, portraying himself as a "saviour" of the slum. When he suffers an accident that renders him a paraplegic, we are supposed to believe that he made a MIRACULOUS recovery. Both myself and my colleague, The Professor, turned to each other in disbelief. Were we really expected to swallow the idea that a spoooooooooky woman had visited Anderson in the night and promised him that the frickin' Sea God would make him walk again? Or were the documentary makers being disingenuous? After all, Mochary admitted after the screening that he had deliberately let certain implicit misdirections slide. Maybe it doesn't matter whether or not Anderson was miraculously cured - the key point is that this is what the people in the favela believe. But the documentary-makers could have made that more subtle point. What FAVELA RISING needs is someone like Werner Herzog, who subverts the Timothy Treadwell/"Kind Warrior" self-image in GRIZZLY MAN. All we got was a shameless cash-in on the CITY OF GOD hype that looked like a promo-reel.

FAVELA RISING premiered at Tribeca 2005 where it won an award. It is currently on extrremely limited release in the UK. Apparently HBO have bought it for the US market.FAVELA RISING premiered at Tribeca 2005 where it won an award. It is currently on extrremely limited release in the UK. Apparently HBO have bought it for the US market.

LOWER CITY - a Brazilian tale of corrosive passion

I guess it is not particularly original to make a movie about how a beautiful woman can corrode male friendship, but LOWER CITY takes this hackneyed material to a higher level of brutalilty and intensity. The camerawork, acting and plot lines are not quite as searing as CITY OF GODS, but then why should they be? Instead of an epic tale, we have here a smaller character study which, compared to your average Hollywood fare, is a memorable and racy ride. The movie opens with a young, beautiful girl called Karinna. She is hitch-hiking her way to Salvador de Bahia in Brazil by whoring herself to men with boats and trucks. (The movie takes its title from the "Lower" part of that city.) Her first lift is with a couple of close friends, Deco and Naldinho and it is with these men that she will spend the rest of the film. While their first relations are commercial, as the film develops the sexual attraction and tension grows. Not least because, in the confined spaces that poverty inflicts upon these characters, two characters make love in front of another. The relationship settles into a seemingly workable menage a trois for a while, but the stability rests on a knife-edge. The boys slide into the territory of pimps, colluding in conning dumb-ass "clients" out of their money. But as the male possessive instinct is awakened and events take a turn for the worse, the movie races toward a brutal climax.

The movie is filmed on 16 mil but looks fantastic. It captures perfectly the claustrophobic small rented rooms and the seedy, heady atmosphere of sawdust bars and strip clubs. We would expect nothing less from a director - Sérgio Machado - who comes to film from a background in documentaries. Some of the most intense camerawork is of a brutal cock-fight. Animal-lovers who find this sort of thing distateful should beware, but also reassured that it is not gratuitous. The cock-fight between the black and white animals serves as a chilling metaphor for the relationship between the two male leads.

LOWER CITY showed at Cannes 2005 where it won the "award of the youth" and goes on limited release in the UK today. It opens in the US on June 16th and in France on June 28th 2006.