The Guardian
February 16, 2002

The god of small things

Amid the bluster of the movies, one man stands out for the poetry of his films. Anthony Minghella on Walter Salles

by Anthony Minghella

It is testimony to an extremely good year for international cinema that Academy voters for best foreign film of 2001 will not be considering the achievements of Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room, Majid Majidi's Baran, nor the work of my close friend, the Brazilian director Walter Salles, and his outstanding follow-up to Central Station, Behind the Sun.

Indeed, there is every possibility that Behind the Sun, formal and as harsh as its remorseless landscape, will not be greeted with the same public and critical adulation that surrounded Central Station. With its Dickensian canvas of Brazil's disenfranchised and an overwhelming central performance from Fernanda Montenegro, Central Station broke hearts all over the world, winning 55 international awards, including the Golden Bear at the 1998 Berlin film festival and a Bafta.

The film also transformed the career of its director, and launched Salles on a journey that took him both literally on a year-long odyssey of promoting Central Station but, more significantly, within earshot of the siren song of Hollywood and the opportunities of filming in English with substantial financial support. Perhaps what is most remarkable about Behind the Sun is that it is again filmed in Portuguese.

Salles's background - as a writer about film, a documentarian of film-makers (including Fellini and Kurosawa), a producer and a commercials director - is evident in almost every exquisite frame of Behind the Sun. The film creates a pungent evocation of a primitive rural landscape using film grammar that has fully absorbed the syntax of world cinema. There are keen echoes of Vittorio de Sica, and the Italian neo-realists, of the fly-on-the-wall documentary method (combining as it does professional and non-professional actors). It is also intensely personal, distinctive and uncompromising.

David Hare, a passionate admirer of Behind the Sun, wrote to me of his enthusiasm: "Salles uses the camera as a kind of handwriting, so you don't even know he's there. He has an infallible gift for the emotional heart of a story, and then, having set its course, he seems to absent himself, so that you're looking at the thing itself." Hare also observed how, in that sense, Salles films like a Marxist - demonstrating the means of production, collecting what people actually do in the same way that John Ford (incidentally one of Salles's heroes) achieved in the coal-mining sequences of How Green Was My Valley. In Behind the Sun Salles shows you how to make sugar. The movie's particular achievement - and germane to any discussion about what makes a film speak to an international audience - is that it takes something precise and historical and, by rendering it with specificity, traduces it to the universal and mythic. The film, located in 1910 and in a parched world so far from civilised society that it is behind the sun, becomes profoundly relevant and contemporary.

Behind the Sun is based on the novel Broken April by the Albanian author Ismail Kadare. Salles saw in the tale of the Kanun, the code that governs the blood feuds in Albania, a parallel with the family conflicts, usually conducted by landowners, that came to define the frontiers of certain territories in the north-eastern badlands of Brazil in the first half of the 20th century. At Kadare's suggestion, Salles also immersed himself in the tragedies of Aeschylus. He discovered that in ancient Greece blood crimes were not judged by the state.

Instead the outcome was determined by the warring families themselves, who established their own codes for reparation. This chimed with the situation in Brazil, where the absence of the state created a void in which the land wars developed and where a ceaseless cycle of violence devastated the region. Salles came across a series of codes defining these feuds compiled in Sergio Machado's book, Lutas de familia no Brasil:

"Vengeance is an absolute and unquestionable duty, an obligation that cannot be escaped, under penalty of banishment. In such cases, the disgrace is not only the individual's but the entire family's." And elsewhere: "The duty of taking revenge falls naturally to the relative closest to the victim. If the closest relative doesn't carry out his duty, the offence to the dead man will turn back against him."

Salles tells his story with a certain detachment. A life taken, a life taken in return. There is a deliberate avoidance of psychology or explication. This technique alone sets the movie apart from commercial dramaturgy, where motive and character dictate the shape of almost every film. Salles is making the point that behaviour in this movie is defined by atavism, by the punishing sterility of the land, by a dislocation from logic.

As in Central Station, the director uses the perspective of a young boy to provide clarity and innocence to this narrative. Pacu, the younger of two remaining sons of the Breves family, witnesses his brother Tonho being charged by their father to avenge the death of their eldest sibling. It is understood that this killing will, in turn, require its own reparation. Just as the oxen unyoked from the Breves sugarcane press continue to drag themselves around in a circle, so this violence must continue.

The time it takes for the blood on one victim's shirt to dry and to spill on the shirt of the next gives the movie carefully calibrated chronology. "Your life is now split into two," warns the blind patriarch of the rival Fereira clan to Tonho. "The 20 years you have already lived and the short time you have left. Do you hear that clock? Each time it ticks: one more, one more, one more, it will be telling you: one less, one less, one less."

Throughout, this is film-maker's film-making, with each picture presented with obsessive care; a series of austere tableaux, the light modelled into extreme chiaroscuro. Salles believes, like Michelangelo Antonioni, that physical geography has an impact on human geography. He took his cast and crew into remote country more than 100 miles from the nearest hotel, in punishing temperatures, prepared the actors for several weeks until they could perform the work of the sugarcane farmer, then relied on available light to shoot the stark pictures that define the movie.

The film is also hostage in some way to these images. As are its actors. The reins are held very tightly here; the actors in thrall to the film's architecture. There is little of the humanitarian mess of Central Station, those unexpected ruptures where a moment - Fernanda Montenegro lining her mouth with lipstick in the terrible toilet of a service station - interrupts the formal strategies of the director.

The film's romantic interlude, a yearning transferred from brother to brother, doesn't quite breathe. Its sensuality is given short shrift. This is a movie to admire more than to love, and it ends without the emotional catharsis that so transported audiences in Central Station. And in a film where rules are everything - in this house the dead command the living, observes Pacu's mother - the event that conspires to subvert those rules is opaque in its meaning. If Behind the Sun is not perfectly satisfying it is because its notation of the effects of systematic omerta is resolved by the impulsive act of a child. The audience may decode this action as reason enough to stop the killing, but the families themselves are beyond such logic - in the way one might say a mirror continues to reflect even when shattered - and so the film strains to achieve its epiphany.

But these are minor quibbles with a movie that manages to speak volumes about violence while being almost wordless. There are images - an intense sun knifing through the slats of the sugarcane hut, the sugar press seen from above driven round by the exhausted oxen, a bloodstained shirt on a clothesline breathed back to life by the wind, Tonho walking to his fate somehow backlit by the moon - that will endure long after this year's grandiose and effect-driven extravaganzas have passed from the mind. The central scene of revenge, where Tonho kills his counterpart in the Feireira family, is shot with an astonishing, heart-stopping verve, as hunter and hunted charge through fields of cane, the frame's foreground flashing by in a fractured, breathless, headlong pursuit, disrupting the hitherto grave rhythms of the movie. This is as close to poetry as cinema gets.