Directed By: Laís Bodanzky
Written By: Luiz Bolognesi
Starring: Rodrigo Santoro as Neto
This is a film that, after the first 30 minutes, becomes suspiciously like Darren Aronofsky’s arthouse melodrama Requiem for a Dream, except much worse. Both movies deal with drug use and addiction. However, Aronofsky is intelligent and self-knowing enough to understand that Requiem has an incredibly sadistic premise, and as such measures must be taken to address this sadism by either amplifying the characters’ pain or by filming the painful scenes with a fervent emotional detachment. Aronofsky chooses both, but he wisely uses the former to complement the latter, and ends up producing a landmark film that invites the audience to move beyond sadness for the characters’ self-destruction, and into a self-reflective rumination of their own psychosis. Bodanzky, unfortunately, is nowhere as intelligent. Sure, he’s gloriously stylish — something he competently proves with the opening sequence alone — but like most Brazilian filmmakers, his penchant for self-serious in-your-face melodrama precludes any attempt at greater depth. This penchant translates to a systematic depreciation of the characters’ integrity, an episodic documentation of the characters’ immeasurably painful trials: Neto is betrayed by his friends, then his father, then his ex-lover, then his father again, and we are made to watch unflinchingly as he rapidly becomes a sad, angry, hopeless, suicidal mess surrounded by abusive policemen and batshit insane wardmates. Granted, the purpose of this film was supposedly to highlight issues of patient abuse in Brazilian psychiatric hospitals (which it did so successfully), and I suppose it was precisely this brand of emotional manipulation that made it as politically relevant as it became, but it also doesn’t really help when considering it as a standalone film, because the emotions invoked never feel organic; they feel planted and manufactured by the filmmakers who so desperately want you to feel sad so that their cause can be amply promoted — which is the case exactly. The most moving films are those that are effortlessly or unintentionally so (Like Groundhog Day, The Virgin Suicides or the less melodramatic parts of Central do Brasil) because they address universally relatable ideas of loneliness or disillusionment that beg an emotional response not because one sympathizes or pities, but because one understands. Here, however, the emotional bits feel contrived and obvious; Bodanzky simply tortures a hot guy as much as he can, and waits expectantly as we cry for him. I, for one, will not give him such cheap satisfaction (THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID). Worse still, he does this without an ounce of self-awareness; there are no attempts at addressing this blatant contrivance — which brings me to my next point.
In his overblown sense of self-seriousness, Bodanzky occasionally steps into dark camp territory, and does so as an unwitting participant. This, above all, is probably my biggest objection. For example, when Neto attempts to convince his family that he is being abused, they act shockingly cavalier; Neto’s father seems genuinely preoccupied with keeping his pride, while his aunt seems fervently interested in extolling the wonders of a psychiatrist who has also authored many books. This scene, as I think it would anyone, first struck me as an awkward, clumsy stab at dark humor, but Bodanzky immediately follows it up with a depressing scene where Neto’s wardmates are causing a ruckus in the communal bedroom, which suggests either an inability to sustain comedic tone or a laughable lack of self-awareness — both of which are reproachable. If it were a matter of tone, and Bodanzky really meant it as a slice of dark humor, I would say that that wasn’t clear enough and that he should’ve made more jokes more often, then I would chide him for his lack of discretion for insensitively juxtaposing self-serious tragedy with sadistic mockery. There are several other scenes in which the film becomes an unwitting joke, like the scene where Neto fantasizes about his ex-lover and wakes up to find his batshit insane wardmates staring at him (it was supposed to be poignant, but just turns out funny), or where Neto tries his coffee and grimaces from the taste (it was supposed to be sad, but just turns out awkward, and thus funny). Moments like these really spoil the tragic atmosphere, so even if Iwerea lover of melodrama, I would still be disappointed in the film because it so readily and clumsily ruins its own attempt at self-seriousness with cheap, unwitting jokes.
But for all the film’s missteps, it has a lot of redeeming qualities — which definitely make this film a hard one to rate. Rodrigo Santoro’s performance, for one, is spectacular. His unassuming grace and whole-hearted trust in Bodanzky’s sadistic direction immediately reminds me of Bjork’s in Lars von Trier’s similarly manipulative Dancer in the Dark. That’s a great thing. The film, as mentioned earlier, is also really stylish. Bodanzky has a sensitive awareness of colour and cinematography; he uses orange lighting to indicate fantasy, blue tints to make the wards dingy and grimy, handheld cameras to reinforce the sense of realism, and paranoid tracking shots to amplify the sense of futility and inescapability. There’s this scene of a blue sky laden with telephone cables, and when juxtaposed with the sex scenes between Neto and his lover, it is powerfully sensual and mesmerizingly erotic. The scene of a match lighting a sheet of cloth on fire is also really beautiful. There is also a particularly wonderful sequence where Neto experiences a mental and emotional breakdown in his room, and Bodanzky uses arbitrary jump cuts to underscore a sense of disconnectedness and disjointedness. Brainstorm is often well-filmed (barring the scene where Bodanzky strangely pans across a room, focuses briefly on Neto’s crying mother, then zooms into a random handbag before the screen fades to black), so it’s really super sad that it suffers so much from poor direction and subpar screenwriting.
One of the bigger problems with the screenplay is its lack of dramatic scope. It focuses, hard-headed and narrow-minded, on Neto’s plight, without engaging many pressing questions: What do the doctors have to get out of patient abuse? Why do they have all these random torture facilities? Why doesn’t the government have inspectors and shit within the ward premises? For a film that has marketed itself as a political statement, it is hardly as politically aware as it would like to believe. Where’s the analysis? Where are the connections? Where is the evidence? Where are the socio-political realities? Without properly addressing these questions, this film can’t even stand on its own (let alone as a political film), because it too carelessly and too rapidly descends into platitudinous THE GOVERNMENT WANTS TO TORTURE INNOCENT PEOPLE territory, and without any self-awareness. Other problems include the self-serious dialogue, the first, almost-irrelevant 30 minutes of the film, the flat, empty supporting cast etc.
Brainstorm, ultimately, is a sad example of a film that often hints at its potential but that constantly disappoints. The soundtrack has a few fantastic collages of disconcerting, jarring, digital bleeps, but they are used so haphazardly, so clumsily by Bodanzky that he empties his own soundtrack of its glorious insidiousness. In scenes such as the climactic breakdown in the club bathroom, the contrast between the soundtrack and the film’s content is starkly inapposite, and one gets the sense that the director doesn’t really understand how to use music in film — and that basically is the impression one gets from much of the film’s stylistic devices. They’re conceptually intriguing, but clumsily used. The premise is sufficiently engaging, but the execution is so lacking in self-awareness and subtlety that it immediately becomes rather off-putting. The cinematography and score are often gloriously absorbing, but the writing and direction is so flat that one is too often left with a helpless ambivalence. Style facilitates substance; you can’t just do something interesting but overtly superficial, and expect it to turn out well. This film needs a smarter, darker screenplay and a distinctive, consistent visual style to really work, but at least it’s visually interesting and well-acted enough for you to feel like you didn’t waste your time… I think.
KevinScale Rating: 3/5
OH the ending is also bewildering in that it strives for a classic indie film atmosphere of quiet rumination, but it just feels awkward.
therein, Therin. 