JESUÍTA BARBOSA IN FUTURO BEACH

Romance of wheels and water

Futuro Beach ("Praia do Futuro") begins with motorcycles roaring along the beach in Brazil, and it hits hard on its theme of the romance and excitement of wheels and water. There are two adventurers from Germany headed for Patagonia. But in the treacherous tide of the beach one of the Germans drowns. The other is saved, and one of the rescue team becomes his lover. Motorcycles, ocean rescue: they may be gay, but they're macho, and their lovemaking is intense and a little rough. This is in contrast to Karim Aïnouz's absorbing, lurid, and colorful first feature Madame Satã based on the life of a tough but effeminate Rio drag queen, a film much celebrated by the NY Times' Stephen Holden when it debuted at Film Forum in 2002. (I saw it there too.) Futuro Beach, with its machismo, sweep, and escapism, is a wholly different kind of experience. It has been accused of being beautiful, sensual, sexy, and full of emotion, but lacking in substance. I suspected that a little bit too, and felt a little guilty about how much I enjoyed Aïnouz's new movie. It's drenched in style and atmosphere, and you must surrender yourself to all that if you're to enjoy what it has to offer. It's an adventure that rubs our noses in what it's like to throw your life away for love, or just to discover a new world where you may be nothing but an exotic outlier.

Aïnouz is a Brazilian who lives in Germany and the boast is that this is the first-ever Brazilian-German movie coproduction. And it's first of all that: a fusing of the two worlds into a film. It may also be a poetic dramatizing of the filmmaker's own story, perhaps with some abstracting and glamorizing; and sexy, well-muscled stars who look good nude and are often seen that way. The first of the film's three chapters is called "The Drowner's Embrace."

Konrad (the lean, tattoed Clems Schick) persuades the lifeguard Donato (Walter Maura) to come with him to Berlin. This in spite of having to leave behind his frail mother and ten-year-old brother Aytan (Savio Ygor Ramos) to do so. We keenly feel the sacrifice of this because the flowing-haired boy, who's taken to Konrad's wheels and loves the beach but fears the water, has been the lifeblood of the film up to now and Donato's best mate as well as his most ardent worshiper. Donato plans on shortly returning to Brazil, but when he and Konrad take the train to the airport for that flight back he can't get off. Staying in Berlin is a sacrifice Donato makes maybe not just for love but for the greater freedom there. But the loss involved is no doubt why this middle section is called "A Hero Cut in Half."

Here is where the excitement abates and the film becomes more conventional gay urban stuff, with misty city scenes, nightclubs drenched in red filter, and scenes descending from their sensuous high to show Donato first working as a diver in a huge aquarium, then as a lifeguard, and Konrad tending the motorcycle garage his drowned friend once ran. (That friend, Konrad said, had a wife and child and wanted to have another child, but this is a strand that's dropped.)

But Futuro Beach soon gets a recharge with the arrival of a lean, sexy youth with bleach-blond hair and intense face, who, appearing suddenly onscreen out of the blue, made me think of Orso (Frédéric Malgras) in Manual Pradal's mythical Marie, Baie des Anges. (The worship of water with a sense of its danger also evoke Luc Besson's long watery classic The Big Blue.) At first it seems this young man is going to be the new lover who will come between Donato and Konrad. But it turns out eight years have passed and it's Aytan, now eighteen, come to find his long-lost brother. Konrad and Donato have changed and drifted apart, but Aytan (now played by Jesuíta Barbosa), who's been learning German for this venture, stays with Konrad, and so he brings the two men together again. Jesuíta Barbosa is a natural screen-grabber. The older Aytan is as energetic and motorcycle-mad as the young one but more wild and angst-ridden. He's both angry at Donato and eager to be reunited with him and share his life -- though not, it's made clear, his sexuality.

I refer readers to the enthusiastic review of Praia do Futuro in Variety by Guy Lodge from the 2014 Berlinale (Karim Aïnouz's first competition inclusion in a major festival) to which I'm indebted for some of the points that follow. Futuro Beach has "florid" elements (like its melodramatic chapter titles) that might bore or annoy in films "with a less generously romantic spirit or a less muscular formal sensibility." Or, as Lodge restates it, Aïnouz "builds his films strong enough to sustain a bit of kitsch." He plays his beach-motorcycle and Brazil-Berlin contrasts hard, but they're what the film is about: oscillation, the pull of opposites. The excellent dp Ali Olcay Gozcaya delivers expansive wide screen images that nicely reenforce the contrasts between chapters, particularly the warmth of the Brazilian beach sequences and the gray ones in Berlin, which are equally handsome. Aïnouz is, as lodge puts it, a stylistic "magpie," drawing from Jacques Audiard (I suppose he's thinking of Rust and Bone) for "the film’s oblique, movement-driven opening," and from Antonioni for the "chillier stretches" of abstract, drawn-out German landscape. One thinks of Claire Denis too, and Lodge mentions how a group lifeguard training session on the beach with Donato echoes Beau Travail. The sensuous absorption in landscape and abrupt plunges into different lives awaken memories of Denis' The Intruder/L'Intrus as well.

At its French release Futuro Beach unfortunantely seems to have been largely dismissed or overlooked by critics, with only seven listed on AlloCiné and a niggling press rating of 2.7. Given the generous filmmaking chops Karim Aïnouz exhibits in this stylish, atmospheric and entertaining movie it doesn't deserve such a dismissal, or to be restricted to a gay-niche ghetto.

Futuro Beach/Praia do Futuro, 106 mins., in Portuguese and German, debuted at Berlin 11 February 2014 and showed at about a dozen other fests, opening theatrically in Brazil, German, and France in May, October, and December 2014. US theatrical release by The Match Factory/Strand Releasing begins at IFC Center Friday, 27 February 2015. Opens 13 March in San Francisco at Landmark's Opera Plaza.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.