Review of Empty Night / Noite Vazia

Sexy philtrums,

Fulsome tantrums,

Unfulfilling sex

The Brazilian film Noite Vazia (1964) is variously but blandly retitled as ‘Eros’ or ‘Men and Women’ in English. Far more evocative, and more fitting, is the direct translation: Empty Night.

Luisinho and Nelson, two jaded playboys, prowl Sao Paolo searching for “something new” and end up spending the night with high-end prostitutes Regina and Mara. Sounds sexist and a snooze, but… there’s something there.

Luis and Regina, the older pair, have a painfully tense anti-chemistry, like two veterans from opposite sides of a war. They hate how much they recognize in each other: bitter tongues, calloused hearts, boredom dulling their wits, age seeping into their bodies. Luis says she’s #367. He counts. He would. Regina says he’s #1800. But I doubt she counts.

Nelson and Mara are less interesting, but at least for them there might still be hope. Nelson’s inarticulate anger masks a sensitive soul, or maybe he’s just another misogynist-in-the-making. Maybe I’m falling into the same trap as his prey: mistaking him for deep and mysterious. Mara, meanwhile, is hopelessly unfit for her line of work: she still feels pity for men, still cares whether they seek her out a second time. But then again, her naïve longing (is the word ‘love’ ever spoken in this film?) might be a lifeline of sorts.

There are tons of little ups and down. Moments of emotion and humanity that, like weeds coming up through pavement, still struggle to express themselves despite a lack of sustenance. Rudolf Icsey’s velvety, inky cinematography provides little sunlight. Rogerio Duprat’s skittish, jaggy bossa nova is hostile soil.

Mirrors and male gaze. 

Two scenes are almost perfect.

A teenage bellboy tries to break in, looking for a place to make out with his timid girlfriend and assuming the suite to be unoccupied for the night. Luis, initially outraged, awkwardly invites the couple to join them. The girl bolts. The boy follows, less certain of what he’s escaping. From their balcony, the four leads watch them reunite in the street, upset with each other, out of hearing. A lot is running through their heads, across their faces: nostalgia, mockery, envy.

Noite Vazia reminds me how much I miss filmmakers who know how to do deep compositions. Almost nobody, appropriately enough, is on the same plane. The girl hides from the moment. The plant fits perfectly.

Late in the night the two couples wake up to a storm. Without words they strips off their clothes and walk out into the rain. It is arguably the film’s most erotically charged scene. It is the only time they experience the sensual pleasure they only pantomime in the bedroom. They can only drifts indolently downhill from there.

The film ends with minor acrimony and a return to lonely routine. Any one of them could have learned something, but they’ve chosen not to. And that’s perhaps the film’s most telling observation. 

Odete Lara, if you can't bring in some Google image search hits, nobody can.

Walrus Rating: 8.5

Film Atlas (Brazil): Keeper of Promises

Country: Brazil

Title: Keeper of Promises (1962)

“Saint or Demon?” asks the headlines. “Mystic or Agitator?” The debate is over Ze, a poor man who arrives in the early morning at Salvador’s Church of Saint Barbara having carried a cross on his back for over seven miles. Discarded behind this modern Jesus is his house (burned down) and his land (divided up among peasants). With him is his unhappy and insecure wife Rosa, who’s used to a better life. Ahead of him is the threshold of the church, the goal of a sacred promise Ze made to save his best friend, Nicolau, who ‘miraculously’ recovered. The skeptical priest finds Ze’s promise a bit exaggerated and pretentious, especially when he realizes that Nicolau is a donkey, and he's outraged to learn that Ze made the promise to Iansa (Saint Barbara’s equivalent in the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomble). While the distinction is an abstraction beyond Ze’s simple understanding, the priest now considers the promise a pagan blasphemy and refuses to allow Ze into the church. 

But as the standoff gains attention, a crowd gathers and all manner of unscrupulous persons swoop in to take advantage of the situation: the press sensationalizes the event, café owner Blondie offers him free food to maintain the crowd, a poet memorializes his story to boost sales, a Candomble priestess sees him as a potential figurehead, the local poor mistake him for a Marxist agrarian reformer (after all, he divided up his land). Meanwhile, Handsome, a sleazy pimp, befriends Ze in order to seduce Rosa, whose dissatisfaction gives way to remorse. The couple tumbles towards disaster as pent up anger and revolution stirs to life. “You’re a rebel,” says a policeman to Ze. “I wasn’t, but I’m becoming one.”

The captivating pre-credit sequence in which Ze dutifully drags a cross across desert, field, forest, bridge and alleyway tells a movie worth of visual storytelling before the first word is even spoken. Director Anselmo Duarte (an unprolific man, who never achieves the lasting fame of contemporaries Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Glauber Rocha) cleverly dispenses with Ze’s feat of endurance and allows the mystery surrounding the nature of the promise to temporarily hook the viewer as the film accumulates a mass of political and spiritual connotations. When we learn that Ze did it all to save his beloved donkey, it’s hard not to laugh, but it’s also hard not to love Ze; he’s an innocent fool, but a good man. And in contrast to the film’s deservingly thrashed but rather obvious targets (police corruption, ubiquitous moneygrubbing, Handsome’s oily opportunism, the newspaper with its recently adopted ‘new rules’), the film’s most interesting investigation is into the nature of conviction and faithfulness. Ze’s steadfast loyalty to his promise is fascinating and debated with depth, realism and economy while being thoughtfully paralleled by Rosa’s own struggle with faithfulness (albeit on a more corporeal plane), her moment of weakness and her growing need for punishment or redemption. Even the priest, ostensibly the central villain, strikes me as pretty sincere in his criticism; he is taking an unpopular stance and becomes almost sympathetic in light of the pragmatic archbishop urging him to adopt a political instead of a religious view of the matter.

Duarte is an incredibly mature craftsman, and Keeper of Promises abounds with visual sophistication, especially complicated, though never ostentatious, camera movements and elaborate crowd choreography (including a demonstration of capoeira, a hybrid of martial arts and dance, during the climactic Saint Barbara feast day celebration) that’s contrasted by scenes of stark loneliness and abandonment. An example of the latter is Handsome’s seduction of Rosa in the rainy, seedy, predawn street, which is lent an atmosphere of predator and prey by the cinematography. There’s a meeting scene in Blondie’s café where our attention rests on the window between the speakers as we watch the multitude swarming outside, and different types of tension build in both foreground and background. It demonstrates the ease with which Keeper of Promises works simultaneously on multiple planes, both in terms of composition and meaning.

My Favorites:

City of God

Keeper of Promises
Empty Night / Noite Vazia

Pixote
Neighboring Sounds

House of Sand (2005)
The Bandit of Brazil

Earth Entranced
Carandiru

Ganga Bruta

Limite

Barren Lives
Elite Squad

Major Directors:
Hector Babenco, Ruy Guerra, Jose Mojica Marins, Fernando Meirelles, Glauber Rocha, Walter Salles, Nelson Pereira dos Santos