“Neighboring Sounds”

The new Brazilian film Neighboring Sounds, about the denizens of an uneasily gentrifying city block in Recife, is one of the most assured, compelling directorial debuts to come along in ages. The man behind it, 43-year-old Kleber Mendonça Filho, knows exactly what he wants to say about Brazilian society and how to say it, yet he never comes right out and “says” anything; he evokes his meanings gradually, trusting us to follow him and to put the pieces together for ourselves. That might sound like film-critic code for “slow and confusing,” but Neighboring Sounds is neither. Filho appears to be one of those increasingly rare art-house directors who aren’t intent on testing our patience, who want to engage rather than confound. (There are no 10-minute static shots here, no benumbed actors sitting around staring at one another.) Though the movie is half over before we really begin to get what it’s about, it’s always fully alive and coherent. The elusive element, at least initially, is the overarching design. What is it besides proximity that binds the characters together? And what’s with the increasingly creepy visuals and sound effects?

With its multi-character approach, Neighboring Sounds is a bit like an Altman movie–it has his love of actors and of incidental detail. But whereas Altman was freewheeling and intuitive, Filho–a former film critic–is more of a planner, positioning all of his narrative strands just so. The chief strand belongs to the handsome, feckless João (Gustavo Jahn), the superintendent of a booming apartment complex owned by his grandfather (W.J. Solha). Like Filho himself, João is conflicted about Brazil’s new, entitled middle-class, and specifically about his place in it. He knows he’s only where he is because of his family, and he performs his duties in a sleepy, disengaged fog. During one of his condo board meetings, he tries–without much passion or hope of success–to defend a poor, elderly security guard from being callously fired. “This is so fucking wrong,” he says, then abruptly abandons the meeting for a date. 

All of the characters here–a housewife (Meve Jinkings) who spends more quality time with her shiny new appliances than with her husband and kids; a thug (Irandhir Santos) who convinces João’s grandfather to hire him and his buddies as condo security; João’s childhood nanny and housekeeper (I missed the actress’s name), who’s on the verge of mandatory retirement–are either middle-class tenants or lower-class help, and their interactions are charged with constant, unspoken tension. Sometimes that tension is overt (the housewife belittling her cleaning woman for an innocent mistake), other times it’s troublingly subtle (João being a little too cavalier about his nanny’s imminent departure). As we gradually learn, the entitlement of Brazil’s new middle class is almost worse than the entitlement of the American ultra-rich, in that the former are just barely removed from the poverty that exists all around them–you feel they should be more considerate, more aware of the iniquities that allow them to be where they are. Instead, they wall themselves inside exclusive enclaves, and they will themselves not to see.

All that pent-up negative energy has to go somewhere, and in this film it takes the form of increasingly odd, disquieting little incidents, some of them real, some of them (maybe) imagined: a random car accident in the street outside; a strange, unprovoked fight between two sisters; a shadowy figure skittering across the rooftops at night. Other times it’s more a matter of tone: a scene framed so that everything feels just slightly off, or a sound that can’t quite be accounted for. (As the title suggests, sound is a major element here, and it’s employed with almost Lynchian skill.) For a good while, I had no idea where Filho was heading with all this, and I wondered if the film might suddenly veer into full-on horror territory. Gradually, however, I began to understand that explicit horror would almost be beside the point: it’s already there, beneath the surface of each “neighbourly” interaction, in the systematic oppression of one group of people by another. In a way, Filho achieves what Stanley Kubrick only partially achieved in The Shining: he uses horror-movie tropes to illuminate the real, unspoken horrors under the surface of human history and of everyday life.

Once we realize there isn’t necessarily going to be a big, violent finale (or is there?), we should relax, but we don’t. Filho’s control of the material is so strong that we grow even more apprehensive. Over the course of the movie, we’ve gotten to know these characters so well–and come to see so much of ourselves in them–that we fear for their souls as much as for their physical well being.
 

“Leviathan”

At the risk of contradicting myself, I’d also like to recommend the new documentary Leviathan, which is very much one of those art-house movies full of benumbed faces and long, unbroken shots. What it isn’t, however, is static: from first frame to last, it’s a full-on sensory assault. Directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel (the former made the deeply engrossing sheepherding doc Sweetgrass) plunge us (quite literally) into an ordinary commercial fishing expedition off the coast of Nantucket. Affixing teensy-tiny digital cameras to pretty much every available surface of the ship–as well as to the nets, ropes, and pulleys–they get so close to the action that the movie becomes a series of chaotic, nearly abstract images: the webbed feet of seagulls breaking the water’s surface; a fish head slopping about the deck in its own entrails; huge waves crashing over the bow and onto the heads of the tired, weathered fishermen.

Most of the time the movie is extraordinary, but there are a few drawbacks to its style. At times, the screen is nothing but a blur of churning water for minutes on end, and several lengthy shots of fishermen are so unremarkable (compared to everything else, at least) that they register as dead spots. I should mention, too, that there’s a very good chance of getting seasick. A couple sitting near me walked out about halfway through, the man holding the woman’s arm just to keep her from falling over. Don’t let that deter you, though–you’ll be fine as long as you don’t sit too close to the screen. If you want to be extra safe, though, toss back a couple Gravol beforehand.
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