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Rotterdam 2012: The Pornographer and Lilian M: Confidential Report

The Pornographer is exemplary of the Boca do Lixo’s comic style, much of which revolves around fantasy.

The Photographer
Photo: International Film Festival Rotterdam

João Callegaro’s The Pornographer could also be called The Movie Buff. This 1970 film’s hero, Miguel Metralha (Stênio Garcia), is a wannabe gangster whose head dances with images of Cagney and Bogart shootouts. He’s also unemployed. One day he walks into a publisher’s office and says he’d be great for the magazine. As he unveils horrific tales of nude ladies in strange positions (male coworkers giggling, almost cheering with delight), we see pornography, like Hollywood, as a fantasy.

The film is exemplary of the Boca do Lixo’s comic style, much of which revolves around fantasy. Boca characters keep escaping into pop-culture references, and at times the entire movies do. The Pornographer is literally pastiche; Callegaro, who’s spent the rest of his life since making the film in advertising, found scenes from The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, and other classic gangster films in the trash outside the American consulate and edited them in. Callegaro then used slapstick to crash the fantasy into reality, as when the hero opens a wonderful looking gift box and a spring-wound boxing glove smacks him. Like many Boca comedies, the film gets more melancholic, in a creepy way, as it goes. The dreamer earns the wrath of real gangsters, who chase him through a fun house. As he turns and turns, fleeing certain death, he keeps confronting in mirrors what a life’s worth of fantasies have helped him create: distorted images of himself.

“The film is a joke on homages,” Callegaro told a Rotterdam audience, adding that his goal was to “to please friends and anger censors.” Dissertations lie unwritten on how Boca films fought the dictatorship, and one of the key ways was through comedy built on a continual bursting of expectations. Among the film’s funniest jokes is its general lack of nudity; locked in a bare, sterile room with a typewriter, Metralha has little time for women. Go further and see an intellectual refusing engagement with his society. Stop there and see a punk.

Carlos Reichenbach’s Lilian M: Confidential Report, made five years later, is an equally weird comic-book tragedy. It came out toward the end of the Cinema Marginal movement, but has much in common with the Margin’s key films. For one thing, it’s self-referential. The opening shot is of a tape recorder running as a man and a woman talk off screen. “What’s your name?” “Célia Olga.” “No, your name in the film.” “Lilian.” “No, your real name in the film.” “Maria.”

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She’s one woman who’s been split into many. She narrates her life in flashback to a film crew, who we revisit from time to time (after one especially shocking tale, the boom guy shakes his head and mutters, “Unbelievable”). She started her life, calm, quiet, and dull, on a farm with a loving husband, until the day a loud salesman came asking for water. “Don’t judge a man by his tie, but by his talent,” the little guy muttered, and soon showed a talent for sweeping her away with city dreams. But then he died in a horrific car crash (shown in slow motion, the screen drenched in red), and she made her way on her own.

In classic picaresque fashion, the woman bounces from one lover to another, and the film spins satirically by making each stand for a different link in the social chain. There’s the straightforward farmer, who believes hard work will get you to heaven; the social-climbing salesman who thinks you can get rich fast; the millionaire who values improving the country, though talks more than acts (“The nation works, thanks to our financial contributions”); and his son, battling Dad through a bohemian life as a dancer. The possibility of the young man being gay or bisexual bursts one of the movie’s many bubbles. Sexual liberation is social liberation, a lesson this lady learns, too, and teaches others. A few scenes later, her millionaire sits on the bed, weeping. He howls, “My moral!”

Brazil’s censorship board tended to punish overtly political content more so than sexual scenes, not understanding that sex was political. As a result, filmmakers like Callegaro and Reichenbach could load free love into their movies, and amid the madcap anarchy (I haven’t yet mentioned the wheeler-dealer called the Grasshopper, who tries to sell the heroine some good land in China), give hope for a freer world. “Being happy is an art,” someone tells her, “You need to practice it.” But how?

One of Célia/Lilian/Maria’s lovers has a sister, who sits in the house all day, longing for something long lost. That’s not a fate she (and perhaps any woman) can tolerate, and so keeps running, and running. The movie ends only because the crew’s tape runs out. This woman’s story never will.

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International Film Festival Rotterdam
runs from January 25—February 5.

This article was originally published on The House Next Door.

Aaron Cutler

Aaron Cutler lives in São Paulo and runs the film criticism site The Moviegoer.

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