Impressionistic social fresco and enigmatic political allegory,
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds resembles
Lucrecia Martel’s masterpiece The Headless Woman in its
portrait of masters whose solicitude toward servants quickly
shades into class condescension, and of an insular bourgeoisie
that has repressed its country’s recent violent history,
expunging the past by burying or building over it. (Martel’s
governing metaphor involves archeology and amnesia, Mendonça’s
architecture; i.e., the proliferation of high rises built
over demolished neighborhoods.) Though contemporary in
setting, Sounds begins in the past and ends there. A montage
of black-and-white photographs initiates the film, period images
of sugar cane field workers, exploited camponeses who
may or may not have included Antonio, Clodoaldo’s father. We
can only guess at which class Antonio belonged to, or at the
nature of his unhappy fate, which occurred, as his embittered
son reports at film’s end, on April 27, 1984. That year marked
the last of the two-decade reign of torture and anti-Communist
terror by the military regime that ruled Brazil before the
advent of democracy so seems, in this intricately onstructed
film, not insignificant. Whatever happened in 1984 involved
Francisco Oliveira, the plantation owner who has since transformed
into the affable white-maned patriarch of the street
in Recife where the film takes place, most of which he owns.
Though he appears content to while away his dotage in an art-and-objet filled aerie, Francisco continues to exert his power
as an imperious senhor de engenho, pulling strings, for
instance, to shield his criminal grandson inho. (The latter’s
extraordinary paleness is one of the film’s subtle signifiers of
Brazil’s racial history and its configuration in class hierarchy.)
What Francisco did to Antonio three decades before is left unstated, but from that ellipsis emerges a metaphor. The security
team that imposes itself upon the film’s uneasy enclave
pledges protection but harbors a plan for incursion, in which
events of the past will rupture the “peace of mind” promised
to the oblivious citizens. The repressed returns as vendetta.
“Over a fence,” the phrase uttered at the end of Neighboring
Sounds, packs a history of violence into its oblique and
ominous brevity. Three simple words hang in the suddenly
threatening air, their accusative but ambiguous and somewhat
unparseable meaning—does “over” serve as preposition
or adverb?—indicating the film’s portentous, withholding
approach. Throughout Sounds’ triptych, each of the three
parts tellingly named after a kind of guard, repeated words
(orphan, security), isolated images (a close-up of a metal nut
italicized by a combo tilt-zoom-rack shot), and visual motifs
(locks, grilles, bars and grates especially) imply a world of
intrusion, apprehension, and territoriality, turning innocuous
objects and casual incidents into portents of menace. Beneath
the everyday sounds of pervasive construction, incessant dog
barks, music-spewing street vendors, and ragtag soccer
matches, director Mendonça layers a subliminal thrum of
anxiety so that, like the prosperous but paranoid residents of
the community he portrays, the director’s on-edge audience
constantly anticipates catastrophe. The very word “fence” suggests
another of the many barricades and enclosures in the
film, demarcations of terrain breached only by the servants
or delivery men who ferry water, dope, dry cleaning or televisions
into the white-walled sanctums of apartment buildings
named Vivaldi, Camille Claudel, Windsor Castle—refinement
defined by European culture, even as children take Chinese lessons to maintain their advantage in a global economy.
(Class relations are such in this precinct of Recife that the
comparative size of a flat-screen TV—forty inches versus a mere
thirty-two—incites one of Sounds’ few occasions of actual violence,
when an incensed Betânia attacks her put-upon, dopesmoking
sister Bia.)
Much as he admires the leftist Cinema Novo of the sixties,
Mendonça urges a new aesthetic for Brazilian film that reflects
his country’s growing prosperity and the middle or upper class
origins of most of its directors. As attentive to race and class as
Neighboring Sounds is, its setting—the upscale, sequestered
Setubal district, where Mendonça himself lives—lies far, as
Dinho manically insists to Clodoaldo, from the favela, the
impoverished locale favored by filmmakers who adhere to
Cinema Novo master Glauber Rocha’s “aesthetics of hunger.” Mendonça’s widescreen images, composed to incorporate as
much environment as possible, emphasize the “landscape of
straight lines and right angles,” the “dehumanized” city of
relentless high rise development lamented by the narrator
of Mendonça’s early mockumentary short "Cold Tropics". That
João, the most conventionally decent bourgeois in Sounds,
sells real estate, including properties owned by his powerful
grandfather, complicates our sense of his integrity. (Nothing
in this film is what it first appears; even the stolen CD player
turns out to be the wrong one.) João’s casual mention of a
maid’s room with a window during a sales pitch recalls the discussion
of “this Brazilian architectural phenomenon” in 'Cold
Tropics," where the stifling, usually windowless service area
where the maid dwells is described as “a legacy from slavery,
a ghost of the senzala era.” In Mendonça’s cinema, every space
comes socially coded.
A film critic and programmer, Mendonça reveals a greater
debt to the nouvelle vague than to Cinema Novo in his
sometimes flaunty compendia of shots and edits—tilt, travelling,
dissolve, rack, follow, zoom (fast and slow), Steadycam,
fade, insert, close-up, match, tracking (lateral and not)—and
his occasional homage to previous cinema. (One wonders if
the half-hidden poster for Jackie Brown in Dinho’s bedroom
counts as salute or assault, given the nature of its owner.) Certain
visuals verge on the self-conscious, such as the “rhyming”via an edit of a skyline of apartment towers with a table top of
liquor bottles, or Mendonça’s swiveling division of the Scope
frame into two adjacent spaces, once early on when a naked
João and Sofia try to evade Maria and the children, again later
when the camera parks at the wall dividing Bia and family eating
dinner in the right side of the frame from a meal being
shown on television in left frame. Mendonça also transposes
details and incidents from his previous short films. Much of
the portrayal of Bia is lifted holus from Eletrodoméstica, including
the name of her precocious son Nelsinho and her use
of the washing machine’s vigorous spin cycle as masturbatory
aid. And the narrator’s description of a futuristic Recife in "Cold
Tropics" certainly prefigures the city we encounter in Sounds: “Even before the climate changed, Recife had already developed
a paralyzing fear of violence, and a taste for the ugly
and aggressive urbanism common to Latin American cities.” That “paralyzing fear” turns Neighboring Sounds’ inhabitants
into spies and voyeurs: the night is rife with intruders,
people furtively lurk to eavesdrop and observe, while others
monitor surveillance feed or surreptitiously capture footage,
like the “shocking scenes of negligence” that the boy Diego
proffers on his computer in the campaign to fire Agenor, the
drowsy doorman.
One of the film’s more symbolic objects is a soccer ball that
ends up punctured and deflated when Bia accidentally runs
over it with her car. The accident registers with her watchful
daughter, but not with the heedless driver. Like the campesino Vero may or may not have hit and killed in The Headless
Woman, the boy with the ball in Neighboring Sounds does
not count because he does not belong to the world that matters,
the Setubal so obsessed with its own segurança that its
vigilance becomes a kind of oblivion.
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James Quandt is Senior Programmer at TIFF Cinematheque in
Toronto, where he has curated several internationally touring
retrospectives, including those dedicated to Naruse, Mizoguchi,
Bresson, Imamura, Ichikawa, and, most recently, Oshima.
A regular contributor to Artforum magazine, Quandt has also
edited monographs on Robert Bresson, Shohei Imamura, Kon
Ichikawa, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
