Bacurau is in trouble. First, the small
Brazilian town, somewhere near São Paulo,
has its water cut off. Then it loses cell
service and disappears from satellite maps.
Later, its electricity cuts out. Its residents
soon realize that this is no accident. Their
village is under siege.
“Bacurau,” directed by Juliano Dornelles
(“O Ateliê da Rua do Brum”) and Kleber
Mendonça Filho (“Aquarius”), is a wild
piece of pulp cinema. Yet, deep down, it’s
also a scathing critique of imperialism in its
many forms. “Bacurau” is satire on the edge
of a knife, political commentary delivered
by storms of machine gunfire and written in
blood. It’s one of 2020’s most entertaining
movies yet.
Bárbara Colen’s (“Outer Edge”) Teresa
comes back to Bacurau for her grandmother’s
funeral. The town is a single dusty street
and most of its buildings are run down. The
church has become storage space and their
single tourist attraction — a museum about
Bacurau’s history — is rarely visited.
Yet its inhabitants care deeply about one
another, which the movie takes great care
to emphasize early on. They gather for the
grandmother’s funeral and sing in unison
as they carry her to the grave. They share
food and medicine and work together to get
water when it’s cut off by the powers that
be. The denizens of the town are diverse and
individually characterized, of many races,
sexual orientations and gender identities.
A highlight is Sonia Braga’s (“Wonder”)
Dominga, the town doctor who gets some of
the film’s funniest lines.
The first act, while mostly tranquil,
is so well written and performed that it
could have lasted the rest of the movie. Yet
danger soon comes to Bacurau. A gang of
white mercenaries, led by Udo Kier (“Iron
Sky”), wants to kill everyone in the town.
Their motivations are unclear for most of
the movie’s runtime — all one knows is
that they’re immature psychopaths who
only value white lives and love guns to the
point of fetishization. Yet in most American
movies they’d be the heroes.
Hollywood and xenophobia have always
gone hand in hand. There are countless
movies where white people go to an
“uncivilized” place and encounter people of
color who want to kill, eat or sacrifice them.
This is no 20th century trend, either. “The
Green Inferno” in 2013 had white students
go try and save the Brazillian rainforest
only to be eaten by native people. In 2015,
perhaps even more heinously, “No Escape”
Owen Wilson and Pierce Brosnan are chased
around Thailand by crowds of gun-toting,
crazed Southeast Asian people. Mainstream
American films love placing white people
in fictionally hostile cultures and showing
their fight to escape, as if that was all other
countries were good for.
This cliché isn’t just isolated to movies,
either. Isn’t the Christopher Columbus
most elementary schoolers learn about just
a white man who extinguishes a culture
deemed dangerous and inferior? Lewis and
Clark are also iconic American pioneers, but
didn’t they also help open the floodgates
for imperialistic expansion? It doesn’t
matter if the narrative is cinematic or
historical. If a white American is in control,
it usually follows a pattern: violent, white
protagonists steamroll the “uncivilized”
lands they encounter.
The white cinematic mainstream haunts
“Bacurau.” The mercenaries carry iconic
American weapons like the Thompson
Machine Gun and Colt Revolver and speak
in earpieces like something out of “Mission
Impossible.” They even take over the
narrative for much of the third act, changing
the film’s language from Portuguese to
English and showing just how damaging
Hollywood’s whitewashing can be, literally
silencing the voices of an entire population.
The townspeople of Bacurau are replaced
by disgusting, childish villains straight out
of a B-movie, and they are missed in each
Americanized frame.
Yet, unlike in many Hollywood movies,
the clichés are broken. The townspeople
work together to fight back in a stellar, no
holds barred finale. Its flurry of bullets,
blood and brains is not just a perfectly
crafted gore show, but also a triumph over
harmful stereotypes and the reclaiming of
a narrative. People who aren’t Americans
have histories, personalities and value, and
sometimes the white man with the gun isn’t
the hero. It’s high time America caught on
to that.
Monday, April 6, 2020 — 5
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
MUBI
ANDREW WARRICK
Daily Arts Writer
White cinematic mainstream haunts Brazilian ‘Bacurau’
FILM REVIEW
My biceps started to ache as I rapidly whisked
the sad, watery coffee-ground mixture with the
manic fervor of a small child. Eyebrows furrowed
and lips pressed together in a stubborn line, I
was the poster image for culinary determination.
It had been about 15 minutes since I first set my
whisk to the coffee mixture, and I was not about
to give up on the task at hand. The coffee would
be whipped; it would be whipped and fluffy and
a perfect caramel-brown color when I was done
with it.
Just
one
week
prior, all of my classes
had been moved to
dinky online formats.
And all my friends
and I were sent back
to the hometowns
we had once been
so eager to move
away from. In one
weekend, my dorm
became empty and
my inbox became full
of canceled events I
once looked forward
to. Over a couple
email
exchanges,
I went from having two work-study positions
to having zero. Club meetings were canceled
indefinitely and promising summer prospects lost
their promise.
But, in that moment, it was just me, my whisk
and my stupid coffee recipe that I found on
TikTok. I was in control. No virus was going
to stop me from turning a TikTok dream into
a deliciously whipped, coffee-lover’s reality. I
whisked and I whisked and I whisked.
But it just wasn’t whipping. The gritty, brown
mixture stayed that way and there were no
fluffiness or caramel hues in sight. I was infuriated,
cursing under my breath like some sort of
deranged cooking show competitor. The pressure
was on, and the clock was ticking, as if I didn’t have
an infinite amount of time in self-quarantine to
whisk this stupid drink. Successfully making this
iced coffee was my first concrete task after what
seemed like weeks of floating around, scratching
off events from my calendar and forcing myself to
find contentment in days of newly-freed time.
But I wasn’t finished yet — I whisked nobly
onward.
In
an
attempt to ease the
physically
taxing
nature of my work, I
started switching off
my whisking hands,
my breathing getting
heavier with every
passing
minute.
I
adopted yet another
strategy: tilting the
metal
bowl
from
one side to the other,
searching
for
the
perfect
angle
that
would
yield
the
creamy
concoction
TikTok had promised. Brown bubbles forming
on the edges of the soupy mixture started to tease
me in my culinary pursuit. I let out a few crazed
shouts of pride as I looked down at what appeared
to be the beginnings of a bubbly, thoroughly-
whipped beast.
I think my mom could sense my increasing
hysteria as she approached my mess of a chef’s
station. Coffee grounds and sugar granules were
peppered all over the white countertop like
confetti. With bubbles forming then disappearing
and coffee grounds sitting stubborn and rigid
at the bottom of the bowl, I started to lose hope.
I could’ve cried. It was a Friday afternoon and I
should’ve been in Ann Arbor, in East Quad, basking
in the excitement that is the start of the weekend
and the promise of a night out with friends.
Instead, I was back home in Indiana, staring at my
icky, failed attempt at whipped happiness, with
my mom leaning over my shoulder in concern.
Her voice was full of pity. “You saw this on
TikTok?” I looked down pathetically at the dirt-
like mixture and nodded.
“What kind of coffee does the recipe call for?”
she asked.
“Instant coffee powder,” I muttered.
I looked over at the crumbly Dunkin’ stuff I
had just spent almost an hour trying to whisk
into a creamy paste. The bright orange package
read “medium roast coffee grounds.” I eyed the
instant-coffee imposter with nervous suspicion.
“Grace, that’s not instant coffee. Instant coffee
is freeze-dried!” my mom exclaimed. She started
to laugh, “That’s ground coffee!”
I knew she was right but I didn’t want to believe
it. The ground coffee was supposed to work and it
was supposed to be fluffy, tasty goodness. And I
was supposed to be in Michigan, with my classes
and my friends and my a cappella rehearsals and
club meetings and responsibilities. I was supposed
to be at college.
I let out a defeated sigh as I started to clean up
the goopy brown mess.
Whipped coffee: 1.
COVID-19: 1.
Me: 0.
“There will be more recipes,” my mom added.
And she was right. There will be more recipes
and there will be more semesters and more
responsibilities. And when those times come, I
might miss the Friday afternoon I spent whisking
my heart away at something as unimportant and
frivolous as whipped coffee.
DIGITAL CULTURE NOTEBOOK
Whipped coffee versus COVID-19 (not a success story)
GRACE TUCKER
Daily Arts Writer
I let out a defeated sigh as
I started to clean up the
goopy brown mess.
Whipped coffee: 1.
COVID-19: 1.
Me: 0.
THE COOKING FOODIE
Bacurau
Vitrine Filmes
State Theatre Virtual Screenings