Given the difficulties he faced in assembling money to make films, and the obscurity of those he did manage to make, Rocha's outspoken media presence had been his major role since 1969 at least, and it now entered into the films. This is a key weakness: a kind of egoic messianism, losing more and more political sense as he praised military dictators, with scenarios for ambitious films which could, in all likelihood, never be made. Both epic summation of Rocha's career and an incoherent end-of-the-line, 'A Idade' is like almost nothing else in cinema. We find one more the allegorical figures whose interactions are epic and poetic rather than realist, though we're also presented with near-documentary scenes, interviews and chaotic, seemingly improvised moments which appear closer to performance art (or, to be less kind, amateur theatre). Rocha claimed that the reels of the film could be shown in any order-history as linear order is firmly rejected for the repetitions and non-sequiturs that are held in place by mythic overlays which at the same time provide the fulfilment and solution to history. Is this a mystical escape from reality, the result of political impasse? Absolutely. But at times it's no less breath-taking for that.
The allegorical forces this time are four 'Christs' who are also the four horsemen of the apocalypse, St George, and so on, and their female counterparts-Aurora (sunrise is an important figure for the film), Magdalena, the queen of the Amazons. A businessman-imperialist, the hulking and Aryan 'John Brahms' staggers through the city in hysterical displays of sadistic power. These figures move around in public spaces in sequences that appear improvised, shot amongst traffic or in crowd scenes with puzzled onlookers, or in cramped interiors with Rocha's own voice shouting offscreen at the actors to scream their lines 'ten times louder'. Rocha further destabilises time by often including multiple takes of the same lines, repeated as many as five times-the 'military Christ' sitting in front of a café and proclaiming that, even if he uses violence and ignores human rights, he upholds essential 'spiritual' rights-and what would appear to be 'outtakes'-Brahms collapsing and apologising to Glauber for his weaknesss; Rocha's infant daughter banging at a piano. The shifting alliances of the film's allegorical figures, in their gendered pairings and their various speeches, provide uneasy mapping of betrayal, power and, at times, possibility. The gringo imperialist, Brahms, appears perpetually on the verge of collapse, yet that collapse never comes: political stasis is the overwhelming feel, despite the surge of action and event and the promises to provide a more democratic future Brazil, couched in the language of mystical, syncretic Christianity. This is a paradoxical teleology without end in its interchangeable reels, the film can have no conclusion. In what is probably the film's key sequence, Rocha yells out an incoherent voiceover speech to footage of the 'Black Christ' as St George, holding aloft a garish Expressionist icon of the crucified Christ, in which he claims the ultimate political ambition should be to defeat death itself. Rocha's voiceover-which, in its halting pauses and streams of language, sounds improvised rather than scripted-explains the genesis of the film as a life of Christ inspired by Pasolini's murder. Pasolini serves as the corpse from which a new, third world Christ can emerge, as Rocha preaches an incoherent political gospel in which a transformed Christianity serves as the beacon of global hope, along with a vision of Brazilian 'democracy' that functions beyond 'capitalism, socialism, communism'. This utopian, ultimately nonsensical vision-which also claims that the ultimate political ambition must be to defeat death itself-has to be expressed in manifesto-like words in order to give some coherence to what see onscreen, even as the film itself seeks for a visual 'trance' based on fragments of language, overwhelming and jarringly intercut blasts of sound, from Villa Lobos to carnival music and improvised free jazz, that rejects the cohesion Rocha's speech seeks to impose. The whole film is a total blaze of overkill-too loud, too long, with the maximum of excess as fundamental methodogical starting point-that cannot and does not end. Ismail Xavier call this the limits of national allegory as methodology-while apparently mythic structure presented in Rocha's previous films is ultimately grounded in a historical basis, it fails when it comes to the present of the 1980s, of a decade lived under military dictatorship. Rocha in essence admits as such in his voiceover description of the utopian city project of Brasilia, an analogy, it would seem, for his own film: "strong irradiation, light of the Third World, a metaphor that doesn't come true in history, but meets a feeling of greatness, the vision of paradise". This is a matter of faith: but faith, while it might at times seem the only possible way to survive a dictatorship with no end in sight, is hardly adequate on its own. Unable to account for the profusion of elements brought into the audience's view, 'A Idade' asserts the positive force of Brazilian syncretism against the violence embedded in its history and as a way beyond the crippling underdevelopment fostered by American imperial interests in the region. But this nationalism-even if it seeks to counter the mendacious nationalisms of religious and military power-ultimately cannot see a way out of them, falling prey to a disunited model of national unity that veers near to complicity with the repressive forces that governed the nation, against which Glauber might at times have staked his life.
