Review: A Fight for Survival Erupts in ‘Bacurau’
In the dry lands of Brazil, the small town of Bacurau hides itself away. Removed from the city and populated by the country’s indigenous people, the inhabitants there live modest lives. There is one school house. Supplies are driven in. And everyone knows each other. But peace does not last and things start to go awry. Bullet holes appear in the water truck. Mysterious visitors arrive. And the town completely disappears from digital maps just as Teresa (Bárbara Colen) returns for her grandmother’s funeral.
It is within these strange occurrences where Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho construct their genre mixing social commentary film: Bacurau. Created in the midst of far right political turmoil in Brazil, the film depicts a hostility to oppressive forces by way of violent, rebellious justice. The citizens, comprised of a far reaching group of ethnic, gendered, and minority populations, are pitted against a corrupt official and mercenary hunters that seek to stamp them out, but if their towns history is any indication, they won’t go down easy, setting up a gory allegory for resistance in the modern state of Brazil.
The perpetrators of these strange occurrences are the aforementioned hunters. Comprised of mostly white Americans, these hunters seek to kill every inhabitant of the town and wipe clean their very existence. Though set in a distant future, the existential fight facing the Bacurauians is one not one entirely removed from contemporary issues. The destruction of indigenous lands in the Amazon, the contested land rights in Brazil, and as Filho and Dornelles make reference to in interviews, the erasure of protected areas on maps are all real problems embodied by in the film’s events. The ongoing agenda by current Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro makes clear that the villagers’ treatment in the film is a concentration of injustices taking place in the country right now, and it’s only a matter of time before the oppressed fight back.
What begins as a drama slowly evolves into a revenge flick of sorts, and all the while, so too changes the social commentary. Bacurau starts by showing the facets of the community, observing the lives of those in rural Brazil and commenting on the conditions of their livelihood. But it’s the subsequent insertion of conflict — a condescending politician trying to provide lacking support and more seriously hunters killing your fellow citizen — where you start to sense underlying political tensions. For your average American, including myself, the nuance of the social commentary might get lost, but you aware of its presence. The victims are minority groups while the predators are English speaking caucasians, an allusion to the country’s imperial past and the treatment of indigenous people.
However, this dynamic switches. The hunters become the hunted, and the hunted become the hunters as the citizens take arm are start fighting back. It is during Bacurau’s later moments when the violence is turned up where the aims of the directors become clear. The collective resistance and fight against the hunters points to a future where the actions carried out against this group will no longer stand, a tipping point of sorts where those in power will have their positions supplanted by those at the bottom. The role reversal along ethnic lines not only subverts the long standing trope of caucasians as victims, but it also provides a menacing warning to perpetrators of injustice in Brazil.
I cannot profess to be an expert in Brazilian politics, but I’d like to thank the interviews in Film Comment, BFI, and these online resources for helping me work through the political context missing from this naive American’s perspective.
