by Jessica Winter

Irreparable grievances and fairy-tale motifs also intermingle in Behind the Sun, Walter Salles's spare follow-up to Central Station (1998). In scorched-earth rural Brazil in 1910, a poor family of sugarcane farmers and a wealthy clan of landed gentry are embroiled in an ageless blood feud. The nascent passion of the battle (sparked by a property dispute) has long since hardened into a well-oiled machine, running on a ruthless timetable maintained by the opposing patriarchs. The last minion to fire a bullet, peasant son Tonio (Rodrigo Santoro), is set for elimination as soon as the dried blood on his victim's shirt turns yellow in the sun. Tonio, soon to fall in love with a fire-breathing dreamgirl (Flavia Marco Antonio) from a visiting circus, asks for a truce, but neither side seems much interested. His father (José Dumont), a vengeance-obsessed ogre, is so stubbornly resigned to his sons' planned obsolescence that he hasn't bothered to give a name to Tonio's inquisitive little brother (Ravi Ramos Lacerda).
Featuring moments of visual poetry as incongruous as anything in Kandahar (notably a spinning maiden on a makeshift trapeze), Salles's film, inspired by the novel Broken April by Ismail Kadaré, originates in Brazil's long history of the badland vendetta, though its themes stretch as far back as Aeschylus and as near as the contemporary suicide warrior-the lethal fundamentalism in Behind the Sun takes the form of zealous family loyalty. The movie's subject is brotherly love in all its extremes; the trajectory is grimly inevitable, and yet its final descent still manages to startle.