Bacurau: Oddball Brazilian Western Gorefest Spins Heads, Supports Local Theatres

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

The Brazilian movie Bacurau, currently available through Kino Marquee streaming service, won a jury prize at Cannes. It’s a sci-fi Western about class warfare, surveillance, and medical shortages, which isn’t exactly escapism.

The fictional village that gives the movie its title (Portuguese for “nighthawk”) is a small multiracial community set in the arid hinterlands of northeast Brazil. The time, according to the opening credits, is “a few years from now” though all connections to the present crisis are not entirely coincidental.

A young woman, Teresa (Barbara Colen), is returning home, and has hitched a ride with a water truck driving past arid landscapes and dilapidated buildings. As she comes closer to her home, the truck bumps into the first of a line of empty coffins by the road. Teresa’s back home for the funeral of her grandmother, local matriarch Carmelita, who died at 94, and she brings with her a suitcase full of medical supplies.

During the funeral, the over-stressed local alcoholic doctor, Dominagas (Sônia Braga, in spectacles and a long red-and-grey braid) makes an emotional scene. Along with Carmelita’s kindly schoolteacher father, Plinio (Wilson Rabelo), she’s one of the de facto leaders of the community of prostitutes, storekeepers, transgender people, men and women with blue and pink hair, and elderly nudist farmers.

There are even a couple of guerilla fighters, including the burly Acácio, previously known as Pacote, a killer for hire, who becomes Teresa’s lover, and an androgynous dandy named Lunga (Silvero Pereira), an outlaw wanted by the authorities.

There are a lot of characters, including a grinning grizzled balladeer with a guitar who writes songs of local commentary, and a lot of narrative elements that feels more tossed together than connected. Still, as co-directed and co-written by Kleber Mendonca Filho (Aquarias) and Juliano Dornelles, the film is compelling to watch, with a hallucinatory opulence and a full arsenal of spaghetti-Western zooms and wipes and widescreen badlands.

For its first hour, Bacurau suggests the fable-like isolated village of Macando from Gabriel García Márquez’s magic realist novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then the Western besieged town theme kicks in. Gradually, we discern that the townsfolk are in a battle against rich outsiders regarding water access. A UFO-shaped drone keeps flying overhead, cell phones don’t work, and the town has mysteriously disappeared off GPS maps.

One day, a man and a woman on new motorcycles and gaudy leathers show up, as advance scouts for a hunting party of Americans and Europeans tourist-mercenaries, led by a German man, Michael, who is played by the steel-eyed cult star, Udo Kier, so you know there’s serious trouble.

The second half of Bacurau transforms into something more gruesomely conventional: B-movie zealous gore-fest of shredded bodies and rolling heads. The set-ups and sight gags are deftly handled, though the after-effect is more dispiriting than cathartic. Like Bong-Joon Ho’s Parasite, it’s a film that feels of the moment, that leaves us with the question. And after all this is through, then what?

Bacarau is available until April 9 via through Kino Marquee, a program which helps support local rep cinemas during the Covid-19 shutdown. To purchase a ticket, go here and click on the tab that says, “Find Your Local Theatre.” Then go to the local theatre’s website, set up a Kino Lober account, buy a ticket and an email will send you a five-day link.

Bacurau. Directed and written by Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles. Starring Sônia Braga, Udo Kier, Barbara Colen, Thomas Aquino and Silvero Perera.