Vidas Secas (DVD)
APPROX. 100 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 1963 - MPA RATING: NR
" The rare pleasure of a roof over their heads and regular meals seems too good to be true, and it is.
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The most obvious comparison for "Vidas Secas" (1963) is "Grapes of Wrath" (1940), but Nelson Pereira dos Santos´ bitter film about impoverished workers in rural Brazil makes John Ford´s adaptation of Steinbeck look positively cheerful by comparison.
Fabiano (Atila Iorio) is an itinerant cowhand who travels with his family from ranch to ranch in pursuit of work, any work. The job search is no easy task itself, and one of Fabiano´s sons nearly dies from heat exhaustion as they trudge through the dusty, sun-baked land. The boy is only saved by the alert barking of the family dog Baleia, who also provides dinner for the family whenever she drags home the stray rodent or two.
Fabiano convinces a penny-pinching ranch owner to hire him, and the family´s situation improves… for a while. Fabiano´s wife Vitoria (Maria Ribeiro) dreams of saving enough money to buy a leather mattress so they can be "like normal people." The rare pleasure of a roof over their heads and regular meals seems too good to be true, and it is. Fabiano runs into trouble with an abusive policeman, and barely escapes imprisonment. The ranch owner shortchanges him on his salary and an angry Fabiano is powerless even to protest. The dream quickly crumbles, and they are forced to set out in search of work (and food) once again, no better off than they were before. The title translates as "Barren Lives" and it only a barren life that poor workers like Fabiano can aspire to in a country that provides no justice for its most needy.
"Vidas Secas" was one of the defining films of Brazil´s Cinema Novo movement. More a collection of talented and like-minded filmmakers than a coherent movement, Cinema Novo was inspired by Italian neo-realism and, at least in the 1960s, was primarily concerned with representing the poor and disadvantaged members of society. Glauber Rocha was the firebrand of the movement, but Pereira dos Santos may have been its most successful on an international scale. In 1965, Rocha issued a manifesto known both as "The Aesthetics of Hunger" and "The Aesthetics of Violence." Rocha argued that people who are kept perpetually hungry are victims of systematic violence by the society that creates such conditions. Though "Vidas Secas" was released two years before Rocha wrote his manifesto, it very much embodies this idea. Fabiano and his family are victims, not victims of an uncaring world, but of an actively cruel government that empowers wealthy land-owners at the expense of the poor. Unfortunately, the film cannot promise revolution from this desperation; there is no burgeoning union movement like in "Grapes of Wrath," and Fabiano doesn´t get to play the hero like Tom Joad. He´s too busy scrounging for enough food to keep his family alive one more day.
The film is bathed in a nearly constant swath of harsh light; the sun beats down with a special ferocity on this barren region of Brazil, and Pereiro dos Santos doesn´t compensate with any studio lighting techniques to make his characters look more glamorous. Many overexposed and high contrast shots make this depressing film seem almost impossibly grim, though the desiccated landscapes still yield an austere beauty.
