Mato Seco em Chamas

More proxy watching thanks to my son taking interesting film classes at college. He was fascinated enough by this film to get a copy, so I watched over a couple of nights (the film is a little long, so were the work days).

Charismatic leads - sisters toughened by the streets, the younger one is a fascinating entrepreneur - Chitara (I don't know the song from whence her name comes, nor enough about Brazilian political clashes from which this story erupts either). Her big sister is out of prison and in/out of the arms of her lover and other ladies.

Chitara's work is tapping into the natural oil reserves running in the dry neglected land where they live. Corporate controlled oil, with military might to reinforce it, she is a sort of folk-hero and lighting up the lives and torches of moto-boys who she draws like moths, and then has a fascinating sort of free-exchange/free-market with.

Other slices of life include a lengthy visit to an enthusiastic church, the camera swoons on in - music pumping there and on a sort of party bus as well. The moto-folks take to the streets with megaphones and a message to take political control over their district. There is another scene during a sort of carnival/convention - much of the film feels like raw capture of events.

I'm not sure how much the super-cop-vehicle added (maybe some drone stuff too in a sort of light sci-fi way). Shots inside the vehicle, and the faces of the cops on the frontline, trying to chant mantras to steel them up for their fight with the rebels.

Anyways, that part of the film is intriguing but less fleshed out than the two sisters. Great tight shots of the faces of the two women, and to me at least, interesting how much they sort of revere their Dad for his faults, and perhaps embrace some of those faults as well. Apparently each sister has a kid, but we rarely see them. So a cycle continues?

One odd thought, this film helps to underscore the cracks and grift in capitalism, it is a film well-outside the merchandised mainstream AND YET in this film we spend a lot of time watching women doing their work, (so often big budget films want to take us away from our daily grind and skip past the office to luxurious settings or mythical magical worlds).

Compared to auto-tuned synth driven sounds, the character of Chitara is like a guitar missing a string and maybe with a whole shot through its body - still a unique captivating sound, and portrayal.

The movie intended to be a dystopian fable of Bolsonaro's Brazil with its militarism, fake patriotic defense, widespread charismatic Christianity, and impoverishment of people. However, the excessive long length and terrible pace make it a failure, and the script tries many things without reaching any cohesion. There is the intention of putting peripheric (and formerly in jail) lesbian black women as protagonists in a naturalistic aesthetics such as the recurrent one in films from Contagem, but the script is bad and the references are fragrant and not sophisticated. The grimy aesthetics in a slum in Ceilândia (near Brasília) in the very beginning seemed promising but soon the terrible pace became an obvious constraint. The first 14 minutes could have been two! Together with a lack of events, there is a boring testimony in a documentary style in order to compensate the impossibility of understanding what is going on simply by watching the scenes. After the title of the movie appears, situation does not change for nearly one hour and a half. Almost nothing happen, and pace is sluggish as hell. There are many boring or annoying scenes intending to show that atmosphere, but they are often too long (and recurrently with long bad music). The most remarkable was the bizarre 8-minute charismatic worship ceremony scene, a penalty I believe that spectator did not deserve. The supposedly main plot of the former convict women who composed a gang of oil theft and smuggling is very badly connected with the elections, in which one of the characters is a candidate of fictional Party of the Arrested People, with a platform with many issues directed toward the rights of the poor people. Only when one hour and a half length is over, the references to Bolsonaro's Brazil appear, including explicit mentions to him, in the mouths and T-shirts of his (in the film, always white) supporters. In the radio, it is mentioned (with bad sound) that the regime opposed "criminals and subversives", like in military dictatorship. Policemen use Bolsonaro's slogan as theirs; nothing is subtle in the movie. We also see that the women gang becomes increasingly partner of motorcycle delivery men, who suffer with job insecurity of (also a core issue in nowadays world). Uninteresting naturalistic long dialogues (on lesbian sexuality, life in jail, dysfunctional family background, and so forth), emulating a documentary, occupy a long fraction of the movie throughout it, contributing for its tediousness. To resume, this movie with more than 2 hours and a half length would work better if it were not only shorter, but actually a short film. There is too much time for too little to show. The long dialogues of women who look like belonging to the poor people do not make the film be truer or deeper.