Life goes on in the city of Recife in Brazil, but simply by watching the way the locals go about their lives can be very telling. Today is pleasant, so the children are playing outside in and around this middle class community, with just the odd dog barking or car crashing to interrupt the peace. However, this is not as placid as it initially appears: take the housewife Bia (Maeve Jinkings) who cannot sleep because that barking dog outside has taken to howling all night. Then she has a brainwave: as well as taking a sleeping pill herself, she puts one in a small cut of meat and throws it out to the mutt...
Although writer and director Kleber Mendonça Filho, here graduating from short subjects to a feature, was acclaimed for his observational skills across the world with Neighbouring Sounds (aka O Som ao Redor), there was a lot of the soap opera about the drama and the way it unfolded. Or should we say dramas, as he adopted a mosaic effect to build up an impression of the society among a group of residents connected mainly by the housing complex they lived in, much like a television soap would do. Taking into account the fact this could have been split into four half hour episodes did not quite dispel that feeling.
But he didn't aim quite as outrageously for the melodramatic extremes of his nation's serials, as Filho wished to keep things the right side of believable, which to some eyes could appear mundane. It was largely through the sensation that there must be more to what we were watching than he was letting on that sustained the intrigue, and a sinister quality could be discerned if you were absorbed by what you were watching: although it would come across as a selection of disparate elements if you were not willing to meet it halfway, those more dedicated to getting something out of this would be uneasy very quickly.
And indeed there was a twist here, which as you might expect if you had remembered the black and white pictures of Brazil's plantation past shown at the beginning, before the action even began, was connected very strongly to the class system. The message appeared to be, yeah, the middle classes might think all that exploitation is in the past never to be reckoned with again, but the injustice was so heavily ingrained into their nation that it was still present in the society it had wrought from the foundations of such global scandals. Filho kept this fairly subtle, but it was in every scene, whether it be as simple as a little boy fruitlessly calling for his football back after kicking it over the high wall by accident, or the household servants.
All those cleaners and security men, apparently, may be paid for their services but they were nevertheless as much at the beck and call of the class above them as the slaves were a couple of centuries ago and sooner, leaving it possible to see Neighbouring Sounds as a political work, especially when that big reveal at the end showed up. But that twist wasn't really necessary, and tipped the plot over into the melodrama it had heretofore avoided; if you wanted the themes spelled out for you, fine, otherwise what was intended as a shocker of a finale was rather out of step with the rest of it. Perhaps it was better to examine the film scene by scene, with Bia an oddly captivating presence as she struggles with her frustration, be it finding new, ever more drastic ways to silence the dog or having sex with the washing machine. João (Gustavo Jahn) tries to get a car stereo stolen from his girlfriend back, the security firm led by Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) is relied on too heavily, and we have occasional surreal or menacing visions which connect everyone; you do get the point. Music by DJ Dolores.
