[ALBSA-Info] On Kadare

[Agron Alibali]

The New York Times 


March 6, 2001, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final 

Section E; Page 2; Column 3; The Arts/Cultural Desk 

Brazilians Love Their Wild West (in the Northeast) 

By Larry Rohter 

Just like everyone else, Brazilians enjoy seeing
themselves and their reality portrayed on the screen.
But most of this country's 170 million people are city
dwellers, which makes somewhat surprising the
extraordinary popularity of a sudden spate of films
set in the poorest and most backward region of the
country. 

Exhibit No. 1 is clearly "Me You Them," which has been
the leading box office attraction here in recent
months. It opened last week in New York and Los
Angeles and will reach other cities in the United
States in the coming weeks. In The New York Times, A.
O. Scott called the film "an unexpected delight." 

Described by its director, Andrucha Waddington, as "a
dramatic comedy," the movie tells the story of a
peasant woman living deep in the interior of
northeastern Brazil who cunningly manages to take
three husbands and persuade them all to live with her
under one roof. "This is a story based on a real
situation, and it spoke to my heart when I learned of
it," Mr. Waddington, 31, said in an interview at his
apartment here. "But it could only happen in a place
that is isolated and distant from the eye of society,
like the hinterlands of the northeast." 

Brazilians regard the northeast, a harsh, arid area
larger than Alaska that is home to nearly 50 million
people, as the cradle of their national culture and
identity, the most authentically Brazilian part of
their sprawling nation. But not since the Cinema Novo
propelled Brazilian movies to international
recognition in the early 1960's has the region
received this kind of sustained attention. 

The Cinema Novo was a socially conscious movement
whose credo was that the only tools needed to make a
film were "a camera in the hand and an idea in the
head," to use the phrase of Glauber Rocha, the
director. He and Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Ruy
Guerra, Anselmo Duarte and Roberto Farias produced a
stream of award-winning films like "Black God, White
Devil" and "The Given Word," until a military
dictatorship took power in 1964 and blunted their
efforts. 

Mr. Waddington said that his desire to make a movie
about the northeast took root in 1995 when he first
saw "Barren Lives," a film by Mr. Pereira dos Santos
that is a cornerstone of the Cinema Novo. "I couldn't
get that movie out of my head," he said. 

He found a story to tell two weeks later, when he saw
a television news report about a woman in the state of
Ceara who lived with her three husbands. "I wanted to
be faithful to the landscape and the setting, which is
so bleak and inhospitable that people find themselves
forced to resort to extraordinary means in order to
survive," he said. 

The other big domestic film hit recently also
addresses life in the northeast, but in a more
humorous and mischievous way. "Auto da Compadecida" is
based on a type of religious folk play common in the
region. Its characters are archetypes ranging from
swaggering Robin Hood-like bandits to the canny
peasant who plays dumb to outwit the upper classes. 

"Auto da Compadecida," scheduled to be shown at film
festivals in San Diego this month and in Miami in May
under the title "The Dog's Will, was originally
broadcast in 1999 as a four-part television
mini-series. It proved so popular, even in
sophisticated urban centers like Rio and Sao Paulo,
and won such critical praise that its producers
decided to risk a theatrical release. 

It was probably the director Walter Salles, though,
who began the cultural pilgrimages to the northeast by
filming the second half of "Central Station" there.
That film was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign
film in 1999. His new film, based on a novel by the
Albanian writer Ismail Kadare and tentatively titled
"Behind the Sun," returns to the region to focus on a
bloody feud between two families during the first
decades of the 20th century. 

Mr. Salles, 44, said that the "desolate beauty" of the
northeast, with its "arid soil and stunted
vegetation," overwhelmed him both visually and as a
metaphor. He felt compelled to return, he said in an
interview, because the northeast has "a unique
geography that describes the aridity of the characters
and is a place that seems suspended in time." 

Both Mr. Salles and Mr. Waddington said they were also
drawn to film in the region because its vastness and
stark contours reminded them of the American movies
they grew up watching, like the westerns of John Ford
and road movies like "Easy Rider." 

"Ours is a country of continental dimensions, just
like the United States," Mr. Waddington said. "But
outside of Brazil the image in everyone's heads is
either that of the Amazon jungle or of Rio. This is a
chance to show foreigners another side of Brazil, one
they probably haven't seen yet but that Americans at
least will recognize because it has a similar
topography and is also populated by cowboys, bandits
and herds of cattle." 

The fascination with the northeast is now leaking into
other areas of Brazilian popular culture. The main
prime-time slot on the Globo television network, for
instance, is occupied six nights a week by a new soap
opera, "Port of Miracles," based on a novel by Jorge
Amado, the country's most distinguished writer and a
native of the northeastern state of Bahia. 

But the spillover is probably most pronounced in
music. The big hit of the Southern Hemisphere summer
now ending here has been "Waiting at the Window," a
song from the soundtrack of "Me You Them" performed by
Gilberto Gil, one of Brazil's biggest pop stars and a
founder of the tropicalist movement, which fused
Anglo-American rock 'n' roll with indigenous Brazilian
styles. 

"This is a natural thing for me to do, because the
music of the rural northeast was my first fountain of
inspiration, even before the samba," Mr. Gil said,
"and I have to return to it periodically to refresh
myself." 

The cover story of a recent issue of the Sunday
magazine of Jornal do Brasil, a leading daily here,
dealt with young musicians who are learning the
sanfona, a type of accordion that powers much of the
music of the northeast, so they can play forro, the
region's most popular genre, at new clubs springing up
here. Since sophisticates have traditionally dismissed
forro as "music for maids and taxi drivers," this is a
dramatic shift in urban tastes. 

"These things run in cycles," Mr. Gil said, "and there
is a whole new generation of artists in film and in
music appearing on the scene and discovering the
northeast, just as their predecessors back to the 19th
century always have." 

As for Mr. Waddington, his next project is to be what
he describes as a "drama about two women and the
solitude of city life." But he has been so gratified
and stimulated by his experience making "Me You Them,"
he said, that he is already working on another script
set in the northeast. 

"It is a region so rich in stories and inhabited by a
people who battle to survive with dignity and pride
even though they live in poverty," he said, "that any
artist who considers himself Brazilian, whether a
filmmaker, musician or writer, is inevitably obliged
to return there again and again." 
  

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