Bog of Beasts (Cláudio Assis, 2007): Brazil

Reviewed by Richard Feilden. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Many films shock and surprise you. Some, Rosemary’s baby for instance, like to lull you into a false sense of security before slowly turning the thumbscrews until you are squirming in your seat. Others, like Psycho, turn on a dime and slip a knife between your ribs before you realize what is going on. Brazilian director Claudio Assis’s Bog of Beasts, playing at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival steps out of its corner swinging from the offset, relentlessly battering you about the head with image and idea. Sadly it fails to land the knockout punch that would take this film from great to spectacular, but it does do some damage along the way.This is not a film for the faint-hearted or the easily offended. It opens with Heitor (Fernando Teixeria) stripping the clothes from his granddaughter until she stands naked in front of a crowd of lecherous onlookers and only gathers pace from there on in. This barely post-pubescent girl, Auxiliadora (played with conviction by Mariah Teixeira) becomes the fantasy of the man digging a cess-pool next to her grandfather’s house, an infatuation that leads to conflict and tragedy. As this plays out a second drama runs in parallel within this town which morality has abandoned just as surely as the sugar cane factory has been left to rot. A young intellectual Everardo (a quite chilling Matheus Nachtergaele) and his friends spend their time poring over the scattered celluloid of an old porn film which litters the floor of an abandoned cinema. These young, unemployed men spend their time drinking and planning their next night of debauchery, their intelligence squandered as they pursue another alcoholic stupor.

This is not a film which seems overly concerned with narrative however. It is more concerned with ideas, with concepts and their presentation on the screen. Over the course of its eighty minute running time morals are discussed by men who lack them and prostitutes are beaten and raped in the vilest of ways. Tarantulas are deposited into a bell jar to join a collection of large insects floating, preserved, within. A local band plays and the population dresses up as if for a carnival, ignoring the horrors that surround them. Lives are shattered, innocence is lost and the pure are corrupted. This film is foul.

And yet, it is beautiful. The film is shot exquisitely, with particular care given over to the worst of the acts depicted. The opening scene with young Auxiliadora is awash with deep, cloaking shadows as the girl stands like a perverted David atop a concrete plinth. As Everardo shouts out for butter to facilitate the sodomy of a prostitute he chases and kicks through the brothel where she works, the camera follows them from room to room, placing the viewer in the seat of an impotent god, staring down from the heavens at the horror below, but unable to aid the woman below. We are even pushed down into the room as he stamps her head into the bed, leaving us accomplices to the crime. The cinematography is nothing short of brilliant in this and many other scenes.

In the end though, the film is strangely unmoving. We are moved to pity for the woman, but we do not feel her pain. We are disgusted by the grandfather’s actions, yet we are not moved to tears of anger by the girl’s plight. The characters are never given depth, never granted more than a cursory development and so we are never truly amongst them. As a treatise on man’s inability to enjoy without destroying, about his sullying of the pure in his greed to possess it, about his creation of the very hell he rallies against, the film works. As a technical exercise in exquisite film making, in presenting images on extraordinary beauty, even when their subject turns the stomach in disgust, is works. As a way to stir our emotions, to stoke the fires of passion and anger within us, sadly it fails. But perhaps that was never the director’s intention. Perhaps he has done enough.