The Petrobras scandal and the call for President Dilma Rousseff to resign, has put Brazil at the center of the biggest political controversy of 2016. With thousands of Brazilians taking to the streets on a daily basis to demand changes in the political structure of their country, it’s clear that we might be in the midst of something special, something that will lead to change. The effects of the political crisis will undoubtedly also have an effect on Brazilian arts and culture, which in America have mostly been reduced to three rather stereotypical “categories”: the exoticism of a Carmen Miranda-like bombshell, bossa nova and “The Girl from Ipanema”, and the hyperrealism of City of God.
Somewhere beyond that, but not necessarily completely removed from those perceptions, lies the cinema of Gabriel Mascaro. With just a handful of films under his name, Mascaro has paid tribute to the elements we think of when we think about Brazil, while taking an incisive look at what lies just underneath that surface. In his 2014 fiction debut August Winds, he both glorifies and deconstructs the image of the exotic beauty within the same scene, as we see the gorgeous Shirley (Dandara de Morais) on a small fishing boat where she is pouring Coca-Cola down her body, which she uses as a tanning lotion. As if the image of a corporate product being used for something outside its intended commercial use wasn’t subversive enough, Shirley begins to listen to the punk classic “Kill Yourself” by The Lewd.
Mascaro, perhaps more than any modern Brazilian filmmaker, understands that even though the country has an enormous sense of pride in their own cultural institutions and products (there are countless biopics about Brazilian artists that are never distributed internationally) Brazilian culture, like any other, has also been affected by the influence of American popular culture. In the five films by Mascaro being presented as part of The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Gabriel Mascaro: Ebbs and Flows (April 15-21, 2016) we can trace that influence in how Mascaro relies on indie film techniques to capture the social reality of Brazil.
In Housemaids he provided seven teenagers with cameras which they used to record the lives of their maids. The class issues revealed in the film are pertinent not only to foreigners who often associate maids with the very rich, but also because they made the teenagers in question pay attention to people they interacted with every day. In the film, Mascaro (who served as a “curator” rather than being a traditional “director”) discovered things that he used in his future projects, like the way in which gender is perceived in Brazilian society.
One can find a straight link between the overly sexual teenagers of Housemaids to the stud in Neon Bull, which sees a cowboy Iremar (Juliano Cazarré) dream of becoming a fashion designer even though he lives in rural Brazil. How Mascaro pushes sexual boundaries and what we usually associate with gender norms is revelatory, which makes all the films at The Film Society of Lincoln Center retrospective absolutely essential.
For more information on Gabriel Mascaro: Ebbs and Flows click here.
