Cama de Gato

Cama De Gato is probably the best Brazilian film ever. It's funny, intelligent and make you think about the teenagers of the Brazilian upper middle classes that many times do stupid stuff with other people only because they know that their parents will do everything do let them free from the jail bars. This film was censored in the Brazilian Theatres, but after long time in the Internet it became a big independent hit in Movies Theatres, DVDs and Internet. Cama De Gato is one of the most important film made in Brazilian Film History. The actor are great, the director is fantastic and the plot is amazing. Simply the Best! You can't miss it!

I took the DVD by chance to home and had a wonderful surprise. Well, there were some good reviews made by critics from important Brazilian papers and that was the only reason why I decided to watch it. But, anyway, it didn't look very attractive to me at first sight.

After the first 20 minutes, I thought "Damn, it's just another movie about teenagers snorting coke and stuff like that". However, in the end of the movie, I was just like: "Jesus! How could this man make such a great film with so little money?!" It's obvious that a film with practically no resources (13,000 Brazilian Reais, what, in 2002, was about 4,000 US dollars) has its defects. The photography lacks quality and some dialogues are unnecessary. But these "problems" only contribute to bring us the "Audacity" that Alexandre Stockler looks for. The Brazilian director created a manifesto called TRAUMA (in English, Trying to Realize Anything Urgent with a Minimum of Audacity). In Cat's Cradle there's certainly much more than a "Minimum of Audacity". Using black humor and social criticism, Stockler alerts us about how sadly nihilistic and hedonistic our society became. Although the movie may sound pessimistic, its realization shows the director's belief that it's still time to think what we want from our lives. Let's wait for Alphavella, Stockler's next project.

*If you have the DVD at home, take a look on the extras where you'll find an interview with the director and the complete interviews with young people which appear during the beginning and the end of the movie.

"Cama de Gato" shot with practically no money, is the first feature lenght film from director Alexandre Stockler, and it covers one wild night in the life of three teenagers and the terrible consequences arisen from their what they consider "fun".

While the necessity of such a film is dire, and it its pacing and mise én scene works remarkably well for such a small picture, the lack of preparation the actors had great hurts the experience.

The portrayal of the three teenagers is stereotyped, bi-dimensional, unrealistic and even childish at times. The three are rarely believable, including the experienced Caio Blat.

One again, this film shows us how Brazil is filled with courageous and creative Directors, who unfortunately don't pay enough attention to the acting in their films. This is a prime example of why "City of God" appealed to so many and why other films don't.

Overall, a worthy attempt. I shall be patiently waiting for other films related to the TRAUMA manifesto.

6.5/10

Cama de Gato (2002), is a proper shoestring indie movie set in Sao Paulo. First time (film) writer-director Alexandre Stockler created a script by exaggerating a number of real life events which occurred in Sao Paulo into a complex moral dilemma for three upper-middle class teens, which plays out over a number of hours on one evening. Though some of the cinematic effects are questionable and does not contribute to the atmosphere, storyline or artistic effect, the different subjective flashbacks which each teen had of the event which led to the start of the moral dilemma worked pretty well. As such the core story and the nihilistic message is conveyed powerfully. The impact of the class differential on the morality of actions is fortunately only touched upon lightly (though in act 1 it appeared as a principal theme to be explored). Stockler's T. R. A. U. M. A '99 manifesto (basically an ironic response to Von Tier & Kie' s Dogme 95 manifesto) is mostly likely the driving force behind the overpaying of class disparacy in a somewhat disjointed manner. This is said as the teens react in a manner in which teens likely could act when met with such events, ie try to get rid of the evidence and hope the entire mess goes away. True to the title, the film is a cats cradle (made through the currency of the film). Directing and scripting was exceptional, especially on an estimated budget of $ 5000. The use of certain music worked okay to convey a satirical effect to the horror of the events but it also had a bit of a slapstick feel. Cinematography was decent enough, even if regard is not had to the limited budget. As with all low budget indie movies, the acting was a mixed bag of really good and really pretty bad. Overall despite many shortcomings , the film worked really well. 7/10.

Though I'd heard that "Cama de Gato" was the worst Brazilian movie of the decade, I watched it giving it a chance; after all, first-time director/producer/writer Alexandre Stockler managed to make his debut feature (shot in video) for just US$ 4,000 and -- though it looks even cheaper -- I can't begin to imagine all he went through to finally get it exhibited in theaters with no big sponsors or production companies behind it (then as I watched it I realized why). But whatever chances you're ready to give to "Cama de Gato", they shrink to zero within 10 minutes: it's an unbelievably preposterous, verbose, ideologically fanatical and technically catastrophic attempt to portray Brazilian upper-middle class youth as a bunch of spoiled neo-Nazis hooked on bad sex, drugs and violence (and they're made to look like closeted gays too), made with no visible trace of talent, imagination, expertise or notion of structure. Visually and aurally, it recalls the worst amateur stuff you can find on YouTube -- only here it lasts NINETY TWO (count'em) minutes of unrelenting hysteria and clumsiness, and it's not even funny-bad.

We've all seen the story before: bored young guys want to have fun, go partying, take drugs and everything goes wrong -- there's gang-rape, spanking, murder, the accidental death (falling down the staircase!!) of the mother of one of the boys, culminating with the boys deciding to burn the corpses of the girl and the mother in a garbage landfill. Moral and literal garbage, get it? The film is heavily influenced by Larry Clark (especially "Kids" and "Bully"), but Clark's films -- though also moralist and sexploitative -- are high-class masterworks compared to this crap.

I don't think there was ever such monomaniacal drive in a filmmaker to stick his ideas down the audience's throat: Stockler grabs us by the collar and tries to force his non-stop moralist rant into our brains by repetition and exhaustion -- you DO get numb-minded with so much babbling, yelling, inept direction, shaky camera and terrible acting going on. Stockler doesn't care a bit about technique (the quality of the images, framing, sound recording, soundtrack songs, dialog, sets, editing, etc is uniformly appalling), but he's a narcissistic control-freak: he anticipates the criticisms he's bound to get by adding subtitles with smartie/cutie comments, and by making the protagonists comment at one point how far-fetched and phony it all is (I could relate to THAT).

Despite his megalomaniac ambitions, Stockler seems incapable of giving us a minimum of visual or narrative structure -- he can't even decide if he wants gritty realism (hand-held video camera etc) or stylization (repetition of scenes, use of alternate takes, etc). Damn, he can't even decide WHERE to put his camera (there's use of subjective camera for the THREE leads)! The dialog features some of the most stupefyingly banal verbosity ever; the plot exists simply to justify the director's profound hatred for his characters and what they stand for. All you see is a filmmaker being hateful, preachy, condemning, moralizing without the benefit of a minimum of talent (or technique) to go with it.

It's very disappointing to find Caio Blat in this mess. Certainly one of the most promising young film actors in Brazil, with his sleepy-eyed puppy dog looks and emotional edge that often recall Sal Mineo's, Blat can be highly effective under good direction (as in "Carandiru", "Lavoura Arcaica", "Proibido Proibir"). Here, he's told to go over the top and he has to play with some of the most embarrassingly under-equipped "actors" in recent memory. He also enters the risky realm of graphic sexploitation scenes (so goddawful they look rather like web-cam porn).

The film opens and ends with real interviews with "typical" (?) middle-class youth -- Stockler wants us to take those interviews as "proof" of what he's trying to preach in fiction. But he blatantly despises and makes fun of his interviewees, selecting a highlight of abject, racist, sexist, stupid statements (which only shows assholes exist everywhere). Stockler wants to prove that Brazilian middle-class youths are ALL present or future fascists BECAUSE they're middle-class and enjoy recreational drugs (is he saying all neo-fascists are on drugs?? Or that drugs potentialize fascist behavior?? I couldn't tell).

With its dogmatic self-righteousness, headache-inducing technique and mind-bending boredom, "Cama de Gato" is bad for a 1,000 reasons but, above all, it's harmful in a very insidious manner: it gives detractors of Brazilian cinema a powerful case of argument. "Cama de Gato" is best unwatched, unmentioned, buried and forgotten.