The Best Film of 2020 (so far!)

Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, 2019) starts at Point A and winds up at Point ∫ba∫dc|ru×rv|dudv (stole that from some math website). I don't want to say too much more because the story twists up like a wiener package and you'll be stunned at the unpredictable vectors it takes. It concerns the fictional utopia of Bacurau, a dusty village in Northeastern Brazil sometime in the near future. The first third runs its finger over the contours of the village, delineating its operations in a manner most Fordian. But utopias fail to generate much profit so complications arise. And then more complications arise... Swerving in and out of social realism, art-film ellipsis, and extreme violence, Bacurau elicits complicated reactions from the viewer. You guffaw at the carnage when you're not baffled by this unexplained development or that unidentified flying object [sic!]. In its florid wipes and contrapuntal use of popular music, it recalls the operatic mythmaking of a great Cinema Novo classic like Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, Glauber Rocha, 1964). But more immediately, it's of a piece with recent popular (populist?) titles such as Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019) and Uncut Gems (The Safdie Brothers, 2019), films that use class aspirations to fuel narrative intensity. Bacurau is even richer, though, because it tries to envision a classless society with no need for aspirations. Ten years in development, it somehow has arrived right on time as an allegory about the terror Bolsonaro has unleashed on Brazil, prompting Howard Hampton in Artforum to deem the film "[p]erpetually in and outside of the present moment." I fully support a campaign to have it win the Best Picture Oscar next year. Grade: A+.