Bacurau

 Bacurau, a village in the Brazilian outback, is a very strange place.  When you come home from the big city (apparently Sao Paulo), the local schoolmaster, Mr. Plinio, slips a psychedelic pod under your tongue;  The town is full of ghosts and flying saucers and its not on official maps.  There's a sinister-looking museum on Main Street that's locked-up for very good reasons and the towns folk have "deactivated" their local Catholic Church -- at funerals they sing weird ominously pagan songs.  There's a troubadour with guitar who composes bawdy songs to taunt tourists.  And the village is feuding with local government official, Mayor Tony Junior, who brings books in dump-trucks for the town's public library -- he just has them dumped out in front of the building -- but who has also, apparently, cut off water to the town to punish it for its rebellious spirit.  And there's nine or so bad hombres hiding out in a strangely lit mansion (florescent tubes everywhere) on the outskirt of town.  This group of hired assassins, Forestaires, as they are called in the credits, is led by the whacko Michael -- played in memorably weird fashion by the ineluctably depraved and louche Udo Kier.  (I last saw Udo Kier hanging out in his underpants in the brothel in Fassbinder's Lola made in 1971 -- the dude was the Platonic essence of depravity, then, and he's even more nasty 48 years later.)  The film named for the town, Bacurau (which means predatory night-flying hawk) is even stranger.  This 2019 picture plays like a combination of El Topo, Jodorowsky's LSD Western and Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai -- one scene in which an elderly woman limps forward to administer retribution to a bad guy is stolen shot-for-shot from the Japanese film. Bacurau is action-packed and exceptionally entertaining.  It has its weaknesses, particularly from a narrative perspective, but the movie plows forward so aggressively that it leaves naysayers lost in its wake.

Bacurau is located in Pernambuco province in the Sertaos ("backlands") of Brazil's northeast.  (This is  the part of Brazil that periodically spawns messianic uprisings -- the rebellion of the murderous Counselor and, later, the apocalyptic insurrection at Canoes that Euclides da Cunha chronicled in the nation's national epic, Os Sertaos ("Rebellion in the Backlands), later adapted by Mario Vargas Llosa in his huge novel The Rebellion of the End of Time.  The movie is worth seeing for the incredible landscapes of the Brazilian sertaos, a sort of scrub desert blistered by huge rock outcroppings.)  In classic Hollywood style, we are introduced to the bizarre village and its equally bizarre denizens through the eyes of a new visitor.  Teresa has been living in Sao Paolo for several years, but she returns to the village to attend the funeral of her great grand-mother, Carmelita.  Carmelita is the town's matriarch and she is mourned at a funeral that slips into very strange chanting and dancing shortly after Teresa arrives.  With a psychedelic pod under her tongue, Teresa sees life-giving water pouring out of the old woman's casket.  The local grandee, Mayor Tony Junior, has shut off the water to the town.  (Teresa arrives in a Agua Potivel truck.)  However, a local guerilla, Lunga, has apparently seized the dam controlling the water -- he seems to be holding the water hostage for his own purposes.  An UFO hovers over everything, apparently intended to discomfit the "superstitious" locals -- however, they immediately recognize the UFO as merely a drone.  The real trouble in the village begins when someone jams the cell-phone signal.  Then, a bunch of loose horses thunder through town at midnight.  When two villagers ride out to the Ranch, they find everyone, including women and children, murdered there.  A couple of peculiar tourists from Rio are jetting around the neighborhood on motorbikes wearing garish biker outfits.  The tourists kill the villagers who have come to reconnoiter the massacre on the ranch.  When the tourists return to their gang, it's apparent that the town is besieged by nine or ten wholly psychopathic villains under the fey leadership of Udo Kier as Michael.  (The bad guys are so bad that they kill their own -- gunning down the motorcyclists for no good reason.)  The townsfolk don't take this lying down.  (In fact, the film lacks suspense because it's obviously that the inhabitants of Bacurau are far crazier and more innately homicidal then the bad guys -- Teresa's new boyfriend in town is renowned hit man named Payote (pronounced "Pay-cooch").  In fact, everyone in town enjoys watching a you-tube video featuring Payote's assassinations - it's called "Payote ten greatest hits" and consists of surveillance footages of the man shooting people).  If Payote is a dangerous customer, the berserker guerilla Lunga is even worse -- he favors cutting people into pieces with his machete.  The gang of assassins wanders into this buzz saw and are predictably slaughtered without doing any damage themselves.  It's implied that some of them are cooked in a stew and served to their compatriots, an apparent reference to another classic Brazilian film How Tasty was my Little Frenchman.  When the villains break into the local museum they find that it's full of archaic and scary-looking weapons as well as lots of pictures of mutilated corpses and heaps of human heads -- apparently, this is a place like Canoes in Os Sertaos where there has been, as they say, a long history of violence.  It turns out that Mayor Tony  Junior (rather implausibly) is behind the ill-fated assault on the town.  He makes the mistake of coming into town with a truck full of caskets -- the idea, I suppose, is to box up the dead villagers and bury them.  The villagers confront him, acknowledge that they under the influence of "powerful psychotropic drugs", and, then, capture him.  Mayor Tony knows that he's in for a bad time when he sees the heap of human heads that is all that remains of  his paid gunmen.  

The movie is peculiar on all levels.  The townsfolk are prone to strange martial dances which seem to be (like Elvis) based on kung fu fighting with one another.  Nominally, a science fiction picture (set in the near future), the film is best interpreted as a Western -- even though it begins with a showy prelude with satellites zipping around in outer space.  The picture is ostensibly uplifting in that the towns people are a racially and ethnically diverse group who all work together to massacre the bad hombres.  The violence is over-the-top including a scene in which a couple of villains (they are also diverse consisting of male and female psychopaths -- one couple copulate enthusiastically next to the corpse of one of their victims, gesturing all the time to the flying saucer that is filming them.) are slaughtered by a fat old man and an equally fat old woman who are completely naked.  The town's doctor Domingas (the Brazilian movie star Sonia Braga, now looking old and decrepit) is a lesbian drunk -- she has a young Black girl as a lover.  The mercenaries are spectacularly evil -- although amusingly Michael is enraged when someone calls him a Nazi -- and deserve what they get.  But they are so ludicrously outmatched by the truly fearsome villagers that there's no suspense at all in the final bloodbath.  The movie is brilliantly made -- it's directors Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornellas have a real feeling for this kind of genre movie.  The picture alternates between close-ups and extreme long shots featuring the terrifying landscape and the action is brilliantly filmed.  An opening sequence in which the water truck carrying Teresa passes a wreck on the highway -- a truck carrying caskets has been smashed to pieces and their bloody corpse lying on the right-of-way is a brilliantly staged homage to the Coffin Joe horror films made in Brazil beginning in the mid-sixties and the director's (in a short interview that is on the CD) speak reverently about those movies.)