It’s rare to be truly surprised by a movie. Even at a film festival (especially one like the LFF, which mostly screens movies that have picked up buzz elsewhere), you’re often playing catch-up, and even when you find something that no one else has told you about, it all too often falls into a familiar sort of formula. Which is why a movie like “Good Manners” is so refreshing, and we’d suggest you went into it knowing as little as possible about it (we’ll stay as spoiler-free as we can below).
Making its world premiere at Locarno back in August, where it picked up the Special Jury Prize, and playing in the Official Competition here at the BFI London Film Festival, “Good Manners” is the second feature from the filmmaking team of Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas. Both have made features separately too, but they’re best known for their 2011 social-realism-horror “Hard Labor,” which screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes that year, and which got a belated and brief U.S. release two years back. But this could well be a crossover cult hit of the kind that makes their names much more familiar.
In a slightly fairy-tale, though grounded version of Sao Paolo (the film opens with 50s-Disney-ish title cards, and there’s heightened green-screen cityscapes in the background throughout), we meet Clara (Isabél Zuaa), who’s interviewing to be the live-in carer for the seemingly wealthy young woman Ana (Marjorie Estiano), who lives in a fancy high-rise apartment. Ana’s expecting, though the father is nowhere to be seen, and needs someone to help her out in the run up to the birth. Clara kind of blows the interview when she admits that she’s tried to fake her references, but after soothing Ana through some pregnancy-caused pain with her expertise, she’s hired on the spot.
Ana isn’t the easiest woman to work for, but the two form a friendship, and possibly something else as well. But Ana is also having side-effects that go beyond most that come with pregnancy: she keeps sleepwalking in the search of food. Food like, as in a stray cat (our feline friends having a grim season at the movies between this and “The Shape Of Water,” a movie that this oddly serves a good double-bill partner for). And with her eyes all yellow and lupine, too…
Because yeah, what begins as a sort of Almodovarian melodrama about the class divide and the place of women in contemporary Brazilian society reveals itself early-ish on to also be a werewolf movie. That’s far from the only surprise that Dutra and Rojas have in store. Among others, it also jumps a decade or so in time at the midway point to meet Ana’s son Joel (Miguel Lobo) as a pre-teen, one who has inherited certain… tastes from his ma. Oh, and it’s also a musical of sorts, with a number of original songs penned by the filmmakers — there’s no big dance numbers or anything, but they’re lovely moments that actively inform the storytelling.
The restless, ever-evolving narrative, and the way that the directors play with tone and genre (it can shift from broad comedy — mostly courtesy of Clara’s landlady Dona Amélia, played by Cida Moreira — to grisly horror on a dime) add up to something that feels really exciting to watch unfold. And there’s no doubt to how accomplished the filmmakers are: the more dramatic elements are incisive, the romance genuinely moving, the coming-of-age stuff authentic, and the horror suspenseful and well-versed in the genre. There’s even some impressive CGI work at play for what was presumably not a huge budget, something it shares with the film it feels closest to, Tomas Alfredson’s “Let The Right One In,” also a movie that uses horror tropes to examine coming-of-age and parenting.
It looks beautiful throughout, thanks to “Zama” and “Tabu” cinematographer Rui Pocas, and the performances (perhaps minus a couple of shaky child turns), are terrific, with a mighty performance from Zuaa, who goes from buttoned-up to the beating-heart, at the centre. It’s the kind of international movie that stands a pretty good chance of crossing over to audiences worldwide.
However, there’s one big caveat: it’s too long. Much too long. And sure, that’s a common criticism, but with the film clocking in at nearly 140 minutes, and an unhurried pace that definitely feels like it could lose some fat, it tests the patience in a way that feels like it could cause problems with audiences.
Still, so much of what’s there is so good that we’d urge you to check the film out as and when you have the opportunity, even if it’ll numb your butt a bit. Pulling off an ambitious mash-up of genres like “Good Manners” is no easy feat — that Dutra and Rojas pull it off so successfully suggests we’ll be hearing a lot more from them down the road. [B+]
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