THE NEW YORK TIMES
21/12/01

Whimsy Fights Violence in a Vendetta

By A. O. SCOTT
----------------------

Repertory programmers, take note: "Behind the Sun," the new film from the Brazilian director Walter Salles, would make a good double feature with Todd Field's "In the Bedroom," released last month to general critical approval. Mr. Field's movie, based on a short story by Andre Dubus, uses understated sympathy to explore a father's act of vengeance for the murder of his son. Its power comes from the spectacle of a civilized, middle-class Maine doctor succumbing to the atavistic impulse to answer violence with violence. The final killing, terrible though it is, is purgative, cleansing, a way of redressing a terrible imbalance in the moral order.

For anyone seduced by this vision - and it is, thanks to Mr. Field's skilled direction and Tom Wilkinson's performance, undeniably seductive - "Behind the Sun" offers a cautionary glimpse into a world in which such violence is a basic principle of social order, the rule rather than the exception. Set in the parched Brazilian backlands in 1910 (and based on the novel "Broken April" by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare), the film chronicles the cruel spiral of vendetta killings that consumes two rival families of sugar planters.

On each family's wall are oval-framed portraits of the dead. Candles are placed under the pictures of the newly slain, and their bloody shirts are hung outside in accordance with a custom that passes for mercy in this environment. The next killing cannot take place until the blood has turned yellow, giving the next victim - and the next murderer - a month's respite before the next phase of the cycle.

The two clans, the Ferreiras and the Breveses, are locked in a feud over land and honor; the Breves family seems, through bad luck and attrition, to be losing. Their enemies are more prosperous and more numerous: the blind Ferreira patriarch lives in a handsome villa with his grandsons and their wives, while the Breveses have been reduced to a single nuclear family with a creaky cane mill and a pair of exhausted oxen.

The price of sugar is falling, a signal of progress, says the merchant who buys it. The oldest Breves son, Inacio, has been shot down, and after the required interval his furious father (José Dumont) dispatches the middle son, Tonho (misspelled Tonio in the subtitles and played by Rodrigo Santoro), to defend the family honor. Mr. Salles films the killing as a blurred, breathless chase through the brush, followed by the ugly desperation of a mortally wounded man crawling through the sand.

Even though they inhabit a world in which (as Tonho's mother, played by Rita Assemany, says) "the dead command the living," the killer witnesses his act with a stunned revulsion that matches the pathetic desperation of his victim. Murder may be routine, but it is not easy.

"Behind the Sun" is told mostly through the eyes of Tonho's younger brother; his parents, perhaps aware of his expendability, have not bothered to give him a name. The Kid (Ravi Ramos Lacerda), as he is called, has a fleshy, sensitive face framed by curls. While he doesn't much resemble either of his brothers, his eager, innocent countenance looks like a premonition of his father's bitter, haggard face. He adores Tonho and is the only member of either family to express the wish that their pointless war should cease.

The premise is grim, but Mr. Salles, whose two previous films, "Central Station" and "Midnight," were set in the violent, impoverished landscape of contemporary urban Brazil, has a way of infusing the most terrible stories with an honest, openhearted romanticism. The director of photography, Walter Carvalho, finds an austere beauty in the empty, monochromatic desert vistas and in the weathered faces of the sugar farmers.

The harshness is relieved by the arrival of a pair of mountebanks - they connect the picture with "La Strada" by Federico Fellini and "Bye Bye Brazil" by Carlos Diegues - who arrive with their bedraggled traveling circus. Clara (Flavia Marco Antonio), a sexy fire eater, gives the Kid a storybook, and her dissolute companion, Salustiano (Luís Carlos Vasconcelos), gives him a name, Pacu. Clara becomes a magical figure in the boy's fantasy life - he identifies her with the mermaid in the book, which he can't read - and also the object of Tonho's earthier desires.

The blend of grim violence with romantic whimsy tilts toward sentimentality. Mr. Salles has the confidence of a storyteller too entranced by his tale to worry about the resistance of his audience, which he thus effortlessly overcomes.

It is tempting to call "Behind the Sun" a tragedy, but tragedies take place in a determined universe, and this film is about Pacu's attempt to free himself and his brother from the implacable fatalism that rules their lives.

The cost of this struggle is, as you might expect, devastating, but not without a note of chastened optimism. To come full circle: "In the Bedroom" is about a modern man thrown by circumstances into a brutally archaic world view. "Behind the Sun" is contrastingly about the honorable, agonized desire to live in the modern world, in a place where it is barely a rumor.