Review: Memory House Fantastically Traces Brazil’s Present to Its Colonialist Past

João Paulo Miranda Maria’s Memory House opens with a fade into the harshly overexposed chrome interior of a high-tech industrial dairy, where a figure in a chrome sterility suit, face masked by its reflective visor, stares fixedly at his glove. There follows an extreme-close up of the glove, then a slow zoom-in even closer on the tear in its surface. This rupture in the sterile white background, isolated and yet formidable, mirrors the film’s protagonist, an aging black dairy worker named Christovam (Antonio Pitanga) living in Brazil’s rural south.

Memory House never for a second loses its political edge. Christovam’s Austrian employer (Sam Louwyck) calls him into the office, where he’s subjected to a fancy speech in German about his importance as member of the “family,” then told in Portuguese to accept a wage cut or lose his pension. It’s the shock of this incident that propels Christovam along a journey through ancestral memory. But this journey isn’t quite the straightforward reclamation of radical Afro-Brazilian tradition it initially seems, as it goes hand in hand with the onset of dementia and Christovam’s regression into a machismo better left un-reclaimed.

After a gang of white teenagers hunts down his three-legged dog with a pellet gun, Christovam identifies increasingly with the cattle he works with at the dairy. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting metaphor for the old man’s own exploitation than an industry where livestock are milked until they’re too old to produce anymore, then put down. Aware that he, too, will soon be seen as expendable, Christovam begins to reconnect with the past, literalized by the traditional artifacts and costumes that he uncovers in an abandoned house along his route home from work. Especially of note is the horn that sounds like a lowing bull when blown, which he slings over his should and totes to the local German-style watering hole.

In the background, the owners of the dairy drum up support among the majority-white workforce for their campaign to secede from Brazil. They may wear blue shirts instead of black or brown, but the overtones of their movement are unmistakable, as is Memory House’s jab at Jair Bolsonaro and his base. Throughout the film, Mirana Maria’s use of long takes is as attuned to the creeping fascism in Brazil as it is to Christovam’s slow, hobbling, yet purposeful progress across the frame, keying us to the man’s elastic experience of time.

After mistaking one of the teens for a leopard and killing him with a candy-striped spear in the dead of night, Christovam trades his blood-smeared chrome galoshes for the leather boots of a gaucho. He dreams of (or hallucinates) a cattle auction which ends with the sale of a black bull prized for its pedigree, a scene redolent of the slave auctions that brought Christovam’s ancestors to Brazil in the first place. His retreat into the past takes on a revolutionary flavor when he dons a bull costume and returns to the bar, spear in hand.

By the same token, Christovam takes a paternalistic attitude to Jenifer (Ana Flavia Cavalcanti), the young black woman who hangs out at the bar, determined to “protect” her from the advances of the white clientele. When her elderly mother (Aline Marta Maia) challenges him on this, he strikes her hard enough to bruise, and she hits him right back. It’s at this point when it becomes difficult to say whether he’s unlocked any real power in the artifacts, or if he’s losing his grip and reverting to the misogynistic habits of his youth.

Memory House, much like Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Donnelles’s recent Bacarau, makes no secret of its disgust for neocolonialism, capitalism, or fascism, though it’s more skeptical of violent resistance even when exercised in self-defense. Still, through its depiction of the revolt (or breakdown) of a man exploited his entire life, Miranda Maria’s film exposes the hopelessness and desperation spawned by a society that drops even the pretense of treating people, black people especially, any better than livestock as soon as they get too old to work. And in opting for masks and costumes instead of special effects to convey the fantastical, Memory House takes on a folkloric tinge even as it looks askance at folklore.

Cast: Antonio Pitanga, Ana Flavia Cavalcanti, Sam Louwyck, Aline Marta Maia Director: João Paulo Miranda Maria Screenwriter: João Paulo Miranda Maria, Felipe Sholl Distributor: Film Movement Running Time: 87 min Rating: NR Year: 2020

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