Neighbouring Sounds
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho
Cast: Irma Brown, Gustavo Jahn, Maeve Jinkings
Length: 131 minutes
Country: Brazil
Neighbouring Sounds, the debut feature from the Brazilian critic-turned-director Kleber Mendonça Filho, is the best movie I have seen this year. It tells the story of a group of people living in a suburban street in Recife, and their ‘petit bourgeois’ middle-class problems. But this film does not have a plot in the conventional sense. Rather it is a wide tableau of life in up-and-coming Brazil.
If you don’t like slow films I would not recommend this film, which in its combination of long-tracking shots and an atmospheric soundtrack, depends more on mood than narrative. Its style is reminiscent of the works of both Michelangelo Antonioni and David Lynch as it is a movie dependent upon viewer interaction in order to generate its meaning. The genre tag on IMDb describes it as a thriller, but I would say the movie moves beyond genre to more of a personal art-house film. With its opening tracking shot, which sweeps behind a car and follows two children into a basketball court, Filho shows his auteur approach to filmmaking. Its an opening shot that sets the tone of the film with breathtaking execution.
The three main strands of narrative in the movie are the introduction of a security firm into the street, the bittersweet love affair between Sofia (Irma Brown) and João (Gustavo Jahn) both returning to the street where they grew up, and finally the comic story of a housewife who tries to find a way of shutting up the neighbours dog and reducing her boredom. At times it seems that the stories have little to do with one another; instead they try to provide differing views of life in the suburbs through a Cinéma vérité portrayal of the characters. Whilst remaining naturalistic throughout the majority of the movie, there are also a couple of bizarre dream sequences that help to add extra layers of subjective meaning to the movie, and portray a feeling of paranoia that exists when being part of the established middle class, in an area riddled with violence.
Neighbouring Sounds is a good counterpoint to City of God, the 2002 gangster epic set in the favelas, as it sympathetically shows the other side of Brazilian urbanity
Watching this film reminded me of when I studied the geopolitics of Brazil. The film illustrates the disparity between those living in the favelas that turn to crime and the well-established rich who have gated themselves off and rely on private security to keep themselves safe. These elements unknowingly mirror ideas of corruption and inequality, which are being protested around Brazil at this moment in time. Neighbouring Sounds is a good counterpoint to City of God, the 2002 gangster epic set in the favelas, as it sympathetically shows the other side of Brazilian urbanity. A couple are seen early in the movie kissing in between walls, and this is a rather heavy-handed signifier to what living in the area is like, where the architecture works as a prison for its characters, curbing their emotions and subduing their passions.
The film is full of foreboding sequences as we learn the security firm is not what it seems. Beware however; there is no generic and exciting pay-off, which could make the film a very frustrating watch. What makes it work as a whole though, is the almost Shakespearean subplot of Bia (Maeve Jinkings). She’s a pot-smoking housewife trying to find an outlet for her boredom while trying to placate the endless barking of the neighbours’ dog. There is one awkwardly funny scene that involves her trying to get sexual pleasure out of a washing machine. It is a scene that in many ways sums up the movie since it invokes both pathos and humour at the same time.
Neighbouring Sounds is an original work of art constructed through the eyes of a poet, which in time will be seen as an art house classic. If you care about cinema that challenges your conceptions of the world, I thoroughly recommend that you go see this film.
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