The Angel Was Born

This movie starts with a few minutes of black out: nothing but music and a black screen. I hear Godard did this trick first. Good for him, if so. I have not seen his movie, but I doubt it is as good as this one, and I do like some of Godard's weird ones.

"The Angel Was Born" is a movie about two roaming outlaws. You can try and read a lot into its structure, or just enjoy its deliberate primitivism. It is both very serious and a joke on everybody. Or so I feel. You may think otherwise, be bored, or even be left in a joyous state of shock, as it happened to me. If you like very strange stuff, you may like this one.

Urtiga (Milton Gonçalves) and Santamaria (Hugo Carvana) are two mean, sadistic and cold blood killers. Santamaria claims that he has seen an angel, and is very mystic. They escape from the police siege in a slum in a hill and hide in an isolated house. When the owner arrives with two friends, they kill the man and submit the two women to many humiliations, before killing them. While moving to another place, they leave a trail of blood, cowardly executing many persons.

In the end of the 60's in Brazil, young directors broke with the Brazilian movement "Cinema Novo" (meaning "New Cinema"), and begin a new movement, called "Cinema Marginal" (meaning "Underground Cinema"). "O Anjo Nasceu" is a milestone of this new current of filmmakers, together with "O Bandido da Luz Vermelha". Júlio Bressane presents a very raw non-linear surrealistic violent story of two criminals. Quentin Tarantino became famous with his "Reservoir Dogs", but "O Anjo Nasceu" is more violent, sick and credible than the famous Hollywoodian movie. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Anjo Nasceu" ("The Angel is Born")

"What's right is what's wrong, and what's wrong is what's right" - João Santamaria, in Hugo Carvana's demented performance, utters this phrase that synthesizes an aesthetic vision that goes beyond notions of antagonism to bring us sensations far more ambivalent than antagonistic. "The Angel Was Born" may not be Júlio Bressane's first film, but it is the first to bring us a disruptive and experimental verve in its cinematic composition and narrative.

Carvana/João Santamaria and Milton Gonçalves as Urtiga, much more than potentially the first same-sex couple portrayed in Brazilian cinema, are symbolic avatars of how the marginality they represent is treated in Brazil. Yin and Yang, represented by a man of Portuguese descent and an African descendant. Both are in the same mire, doubly persecuted by the police as criminals and by the moral distortion of being who they are. There's no heroism in Santamaria and Urtiga, but a relationship permeated by anguish. Santamaria seeks some redemption in Candomblé, but the one truly holding him back is his friend and accomplice, Urtiga. And when the two invade a mansion, they promote a spectacle of cruelty and a distortion of what could be a class struggle through the mockery of privilege. And scenes of explicit misogyny, with Norma Bengell and Maria Gladys as victims.

It's not a linear narrative, there's no obvious line of fact in "The Angel Was Born," but there is a questioning of the nature of cinematic narrative and its potential. Bressane constantly questions how much cinema can truly help solve Brazil's social problems-and this question was truly aimed at the so-called Cinema Novo. Even while dealing with taboo subjects, "The Angel Was Born" makes a point of constantly stating that it is CINEMA and that it possesses a commitment that sums itself up as a cinematic work. Especially because the vision of Brazil offered by this film is ambivalently irreverent and pessimistic. It's one of forced, agonizing laughter. A scream of pain drifts toward the horizon, in the wake of a car's escape, while Dorival Caymmi's "Peguei um Ita do Norte" plays. Bressane doesn't give us answers, but he does offer some poetry.

I want to give special mention to the cacophonous soundtrack, as disruptive as the film itself, by Minas Gerais composer Guilherme Magalhães Vaz. I consider him one of the most important composers in Brazilian cinema, and the music he composed for this film is AMAZING.