NY POST.COM
December 21, 2001

MCCOYS, HATFIELDS IN BRAZIL

by JONATHAN FOREMAN

BEHIND THE SUN

A gorgeous sun-baked fable from Brazil.In Portuguese with English subtitles. Running time: 105 minutes. PG-13 (violence, brief sexuality). At the Sunshine Cinema, Houston and Forsyth streets.
THE latest film by the Brazilian director/producer team of Walter Salles and Arthur Cohn (nominated for an Oscar for the wonderful "Central Station" in 1998) is a gorgeously photographed, sun-baked fable about a rural vendetta.
Based on the novel "Broken April," by the Albanian author Ismail Kadare, the story has been moved from the Balkans to the Brazilian outback in 1910 - a place so remote that the young narrator says it is "behind the sun."
There, a dispute between two families that was once about land and money has become a cycle of vengeance, feeding on grief, creeping impoverishment and a culture of honor.
The narrator is a boy known only as "kid" (Ravi Ramos Lacerda). His eldest brother has recently been killed, and the next oldest, Tonho (Rodrigo Santoro), is required to take a life in return.
Kid adores Tonho and is desperate not to lose him. But their bitter, violent-tempered father (Jose Dumont) has become more obsessed with the feud as the family's economic fortunes - dependent on the sugar cane the whole family mills- have waned.
Still, when a pair of circus entertainers comes by - one of them a beautiful, fire-eating young girl (Flavia Marco Antonio) - it looks as if one or more of the brothers might escape the cycle of violence.
The photography is superb and there are some spectacular sequences, including a brilliantly shot chase. For the most part, Salles gets fine performances from a cast that includes veterans from "Central Station" and "Midnight." The exception, and it's a damaging one in terms of the story's emotional power, is Santoro, who looks like a male-model miraculously deposited in the middle of nowhere.