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Written by: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Directed by: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Starring: Wagner Moura, Carlos Francisco, Tânia Maria
Rated: R
Watch the trailer
Plot
In this Portuguese language film set during 1977, Marcelo hopes to escape Brazil and mercenary killers with his young son after becoming the target of a dictator during a ruthless and tumultuous political period.
Verdict
Later in the movie as this returns to the future, or present depending on your perspective, we see how the time periods connect and how things have changed. Those past events have been forgotten
or covered up though the pain and suffering isn't that far away. The movie is a bit
messy, but the ending brings it together by putting this story into a
context. In the beginning it seems like some kind of action movie or drama, but
towards the end it's a tragedy. Corruption upended the lives of many, and their legacy doesn't even endure. Crimes have been concealed, and the guilty got away.
Watch it.
Review
This has an interesting start. Marcelo (Wagner Moura) stops at a gas station where a dead body is lying out front covered by a piece of cardboard. The deceased is a robber that was shot in the act. Being Carnival, the police have been too busy to address the situation. It's cryptic, but this is a movie that's ultimately about the things in plain sight people ignore. If there's no authority to take care of it, the situation doesn't resolve.
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| Wagner Moura plays Marcelo |
Marcelo returns home, though we don't know why. He ends up living with other refugees, and working at the identity card office. He befriends the local, corrupt police chief which could be good protection or create trouble as Marcelo seems to be hiding. We introduced to what appears to be contract killers hired to track him down.
Marcelo meets a resistance leader who wants to interview him. Through that we see how he ended up back at Recife. Ghirotti in essence bought Marcelo's university to further his own business interests and root out the competition. Marcelo isn't on board, and Ghirotti wants to stomp out any resistance. This connects to the present where students are listening to resistance interviews and recordings as they try to piece together what happened.
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| Laura Lufési, Wagner Moura play Flavia, Ferdinand |
The two contract killers manage to track Marcelo down, but we don't see what happens.
A leg recovered earlier in the movie is stolen from the morgue by Ghirotti's adult children. They throw it in the river where this genre shifts and the leg comes to life and jumps around killing people. The scenes are disorienting. It's revealed to be a newspaper article, just as the scenes distract from the movie, the article is a cover for corruption. It's fiction as fact.
This returns to the present day where the student researching Marcello and the resistance track down his son who agrees to an interview. The persecution his father faced is all but forgotten. He was too young to see it, shielded from the events. It's wild that a university professor has to go on the run. The level of corruption is unfathomable. That ties back to the opening scene. The body was there, everyone saw it, but nothing was done. Everyone waited on someone else to take care of it. Instead of the persecution being a stain on the country, students try to piece together the remains as that time period is mostly forgotten. Marcelo should be celebrated for resisting but even his own son has lost track of him.
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