Neighbouring Sounds (2012)

The starting point of Kleber Mendoca Filho's Neighbouring Sounds is fascinating: his film takes us to a community in Recife, a city in North-East Brazil. We meet a bunch of people living in the neighborhood and we are also invited into a world of sounds and architerture (gates, fences, streets, apartments). Urban sounds and urban architecture, revealing something about the state of present capitalism, class differences and fetischized security. This approach feels fresh, and I wish the director would have taken it further, rather than crafting a typical story with elements of drama and thriller. The very first scene with a girl on rollerskates is promising, and the first segment has its thrilling moments, but the whole thing feels contrived. The film had potential (one reviewer depicted it as a weird soap opera without a plot - I like that), also in its visual style, but in the end I wasn't impressed. The best scenes were the weirdest ones: a sudden waterfall of blood, two young people in an old building that used to be a cinema, a repeated nightmare. Here, Filho shows that he has something to contribute. Something that bothered me was a rather sexist view of women (how the camera focused on female bodies gratuituously, without it adding anything to the movie). If the film would've stuck with those sounds - rumbling noise, the yelping dog, footsteps and sirens - instead of repeating a story about macho men, I think I would have liked Neighbouring Sounds a great deal.

Carandiru (2003)

I tried to watch the Brazilian film Carandiru (2003) tonight. Even though I found this depiction of a sao paolo prison interesting enough, I was too fed up with "male honor" & gangstas to go through with it. Yes, it is an unusual film in how it explores themes like sexuality in prison, AIDS, illnesses, the daily routines of prison etc. But structurally, it was a tangle of stories and characters for which it was hard to keep up interest. And hey, telling stories in flashback is rarely a good idea.