VOGUE Film & TV
Microcosms: Little White Lies and Neighboring Sounds
Gustavo Jahn and Irma Brown in Neighboring Sound
“Brazil is not a serious country,” Charles de Gaulle once said, and
though he wasn’t right, you can’t blame him for thinking so. After all,
most of what we know about this huge, populous land is either cheerfully
carnal—from samba schools and soccer to the Girl from Ipanema—or else
terrifyingly bleak, like those scenes in such moves as City of God where little kids in the favelas gun each other down.
Of course, beyond the mythology, there’s also the real Brazil. And it, like China, has enjoyed a long economic boom that has pushed millions into the middle class. It’s this modernizing, increasingly prosperous Brazil that we get in Neighboring Sounds, the internationally acclaimed debut feature by Kleber Mendonça Filho. Sly, funny, and deeply unsettling, this isn’t merely the best new movie I’ve seen this year, it may well be the best Brazilian movie since the 1970s.
Neighboring Sounds takes place in Mendonça’s home city of Recife, more precisely on a middle-class street by the sea where the last remaining family houses are being replaced by concrete high-rises filled with plasma TVs, kids studying Mandarin, and couples making love, sometimes illicitly. Ruling the roost is Francisco (W. J. Solha), a white-bearded, seemingly affable patrón who owns most of the neighborhood with money from the family’s sugar plantation. Francisco’s properties contain a wide range of people. There are his two grandsons, hangdog João (Gustavo Jahn), who glumly sells real estate, and sociopathic Dinho (Yuri Holanda), who looks like Ryan Phillippe but has the soul of Joe Pesci. There’s stay-at-home mom Bia (Maeve Jinkings) who gets stoned and kinky when her kids are at school. And, out on the street, there’s a team of security guards led by Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos), an ambiguous fellow who protects the residents from terrors that seem more imagined than real.
Like a low-key Robert Altman picture or maybe an HBO series by Luis Buñuel, the movie sucks you in with interweaving characters whose behavior—be it drugging a barking dog, arguing over firing a night watchman, or simply mopping the floor—gradually reveals a larger pattern of social meaning. In the process, Mendonça offers us a CAT scan of twenty-first century Brazil, in which a sleek new world appears to be rising yet the worm-eaten old values live on within it.
Of course, beyond the mythology, there’s also the real Brazil. And it, like China, has enjoyed a long economic boom that has pushed millions into the middle class. It’s this modernizing, increasingly prosperous Brazil that we get in Neighboring Sounds, the internationally acclaimed debut feature by Kleber Mendonça Filho. Sly, funny, and deeply unsettling, this isn’t merely the best new movie I’ve seen this year, it may well be the best Brazilian movie since the 1970s.
Neighboring Sounds takes place in Mendonça’s home city of Recife, more precisely on a middle-class street by the sea where the last remaining family houses are being replaced by concrete high-rises filled with plasma TVs, kids studying Mandarin, and couples making love, sometimes illicitly. Ruling the roost is Francisco (W. J. Solha), a white-bearded, seemingly affable patrón who owns most of the neighborhood with money from the family’s sugar plantation. Francisco’s properties contain a wide range of people. There are his two grandsons, hangdog João (Gustavo Jahn), who glumly sells real estate, and sociopathic Dinho (Yuri Holanda), who looks like Ryan Phillippe but has the soul of Joe Pesci. There’s stay-at-home mom Bia (Maeve Jinkings) who gets stoned and kinky when her kids are at school. And, out on the street, there’s a team of security guards led by Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos), an ambiguous fellow who protects the residents from terrors that seem more imagined than real.
Like a low-key Robert Altman picture or maybe an HBO series by Luis Buñuel, the movie sucks you in with interweaving characters whose behavior—be it drugging a barking dog, arguing over firing a night watchman, or simply mopping the floor—gradually reveals a larger pattern of social meaning. In the process, Mendonça offers us a CAT scan of twenty-first century Brazil, in which a sleek new world appears to be rising yet the worm-eaten old values live on within it.
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