Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sat Mar 09, 2013 4:03 pm 
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GEÓRGIOS KOKKOS AND MARIA LUIZA TAVARES IN THEY'LL COME BACK

Privileged girl left on her own encounters Brazil's social clashes and life's possiblities

As the new Brazilian film They'll Come Back begins, seen from a distant panoramic perspective, Cris (the very distinctive Maria Luiza Tavares, who carries the film from beginning to end) aged 12, and her slightly older brother Peu (Geórgio Kokkosi) are abruptly dropped off at the side of a country highway by their parents. Then we see them up close, with cars roaring by. There they are, in the middle of nowhere. They have apparently been banished for fighting with each other. Very quickly the punishment that the two kids assumed would be only temporary turns into something vast and open ended. Against Cris's protests, Peu walks off to find a gas station he thinks is not far, leaving Cris so one of them will be at the place where their parents know they left them. From then on the film follows Cris by herself as she endures a surprising adventure, conceived, according to Marcelo Lordello's sly and original script to be at once much more boring and more unexpected and original than one would have expected. She's led in the successive days passively through a series of different worlds, guided more by the people that inhabit them than by herself. Cris is passed from one person to another, confronting realities quite different from any she's ever known. Nothing is as it might seem, but the heart of the experience is the openness to alternate worlds Cris learns to have, which becomes subtly clear when she's finally returned home and finds things transformed not just to her mind but materially in astonishing ways. Writing, filming, and acting are original and seamless throughout.

At the beginning Cris sleeps on a roadside bench that first night. She won't talk to a dark youth who comes by on a bike, but the nest day she lets him take her to his family living in a squatter farming community, where she waits for mom and pop to return. And then is taken to the police, and passed on to a woman who cleans rich people's seaside houses. The film’s class-conscious agenda is transparent but made convincing through a steady accumulation of detail, particularly in a revealing surprise encounter at a resort between Cris and a lazy, reclusive young relative intentionally on a flight from family and city life. They seem kindred spirits, and maybe Cris, having escaped servitude with the housecleaner, might like to linger in this resort house herslef for a while, but she knows she needs to be driven back to Recife.

They'll Come Back represents another promising feature film debut from the group working out of the Brazilian coastal city of Recife, also soure of last year's strong New Directors/New Films feature, Kleber Mendonça Filho's Neighboring Sounds. Other Recife filmmakers well received at Rotterdam of late are Cláudio Assis, Gabriel Mascaro, and Marcelo Gomes. This is Lordello's first fiction film after several documentaries. In both the sense of class confrontation and parental abandonment one may be also reminded of Argentinian Celina Murga's provocative 2007 film A Week Alone/Una semana solos (Film Comment Selects 2009).

They'll Come Back/Eles Voltam, 105 mins., debuted at Brazilia Sept. 2012 where it won awards for Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Film. It also showed at Rotterdam January 2013 and was nominated for a Tiger Award. It was screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films, the New York series jointly sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, a program presented to the public from March 20 to 31, 2013.

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