THE INDEPENDENT
March 8th, 2002

Behind the Sun
by Anthony Quinn

Walter Salles, who made Foreign Land and the Oscar-nominated Central Station, achieves an almost mythic grandeur in his latest film, Behind the Sun. Based on the novel by Ismail Kadaré, it examines a blood feud that has raged for years between two peasant families, shifting the setting from Albania to rural Brazil. The year is 1910, and the feud, which began over a land dispute, has just claimed the life of the oldest Breves son; his father (José Dumont), poisoned with hatred, now orders the next in line, Tonho (Rodrigo Santoro) to avenge the family honour with a killing.

Salles deftly adumbrates the bizarre, near-cabbalistic rituals that underlie the blood feud. Once Tonho has claimed his family's revenge, he is granted admittance to his victim's funeral and told by the ancient paterfamilias that his life is safe until the next full moon - and a black band is strapped to his arm as a reminder of his fate. But things change when Tonho's devoted younger brother Pacu (Ravi Ramos Lacerda) introduces him to a circus performer (Flavia Marco Antonio), and thus to the possibility of escape from the cycle of doom, symbolised in the wheel of the sugar-cane crusher around which the impoverished family labours each day.

The film might be the most beautiful-looking of the year. Salles's cinematographer, Walter Carvalho catches an extraordinary quality of light (see picture, right), contrasting the roasted desert stretches of the Brazilian badlands by day and the velvety shadow-play of faces by night - a Caravaggio come to life (the dark-eyed, tousle-haired brothers both look like an artist's model). The everyday hardship and exhaustion of peasant life are set against magical images of transcendence, like that of a woman spinning atop a rope against a dramatic azure sky, and the tree-seat on which Pacu swings delightedly to and fro. Even if one can see the denouement coming, Behind the Sun maintains an irresistible dramatic tension, and in its portrayal of a profound brotherly love, it delivers a strong emotional kickback.