From the Illinois International Review, Winter 2007

Representing and Misrepresenting Brazil: Violence in Movies

Antonio Luciano Tosta, Assistant Professor of Brazilian Literature & Culture, Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese

On December 1st, 2006 John Stockwell’s thriller Turistas, the story of a group of US teenage “tourists” who go to Brazil on vacation, was released nationally. Although Rio de Janeiro is known as the “Wonderful City,” the travelers in Stockwell’s drama are in for dreadful surprises. After a deceiving “sex, drugs, and Samba” welcome, the youngsters wind up stranded in a village, where they realize that their documents and money have been stolen. They later face torture and are persecuted by organ brokers who want to sell their body parts in the black market. The movie trailer highlights that Brazil “looks like Paradise” and is “a country where anything goes.” This stereotypical portrayal, which includes the movie’s appeal to violence, has caused a commotion among Brazilians everywhere.

The passion that has characterized discussions about Turistas is partly because global organ trafficking has been associated with Brazil. As much as one might argue that the black market organ trade is an urban legend, the theme has been brought up in at least two contemporary Brazilian films. Central Station, directed by Walter Salles, portrayed the saga of a young boy who is sold to, and subsequently rescued from, organ snatchers. Sérgio Bianchi’s Chronically Unfeasible also portrays an organ trafficking business disguised as an adoption company. Both films hit Brazil vehemently when they were released, especially because they make explicit social criticism, and incorporate echoes of the “aesthetics of violence” that characterized Brazilian Cinema Novo movement in the sixties. Influenced by Italian neo-realism, directors such as Glauber Rocha and Cacá Diegues, created an intellectual and aesthetic movement whose agenda focused on the discussion of national reality, bringing to light social and political inequality at a time when Brazil experienced a fierce dictatorship.

Although the Cinema Novo productions differ from these recent films, as in the explicit rejection of Hollywood-like cinematography, many of the latter share with the former a commitment to causing social impact by making overt criticism in a documentary manner. Violence is used to highlight oppression and exclusion, as it is portrayed as the outcome of failed economic and judicial governmental policies. Moreover, these films aim at revealing Brazil to its people. That is why Turistas cannot, in fact, be compared with most Brazilian films that explore the theme of violence. Brazilians’ disapproving reaction to Stockwell’s film, therefore, is more than a rejection of an imperialistic look at a third-world society. Turistas tells nothing but the story of a “Spring Break vacation gone really badly.” It generates no reflection on Brazil. Therefore, Turistas misrepresents, or rather, does not represent Brazil whatsoever.

Central Station was the first film in the 1990s that achieved international reputation and connected Brazil to corruption and violence. But Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund’s City of God is the best-known representative of the genre. Resembling gangster and US Western films, it depicts not only the structure of the drug traffic and power disputes among drug lords in a Rio shantytown, but also police corruption, class differences, and social and spatial exclusion. Violence is also a major theme in Invasor, Carandiru, O Homem do Ano, Lower City, Notícias de uma Guerra Particular, and Ônibus 174. Although Brazilian films are also exploring other themes, such as the depiction of colonial and political history, violence still predominates. This choice of representation is incomplete, but valid because violence is a reality in most urban areas and needs to be addressed so that the population can continue to debate its causes and possible solutions.