Sylvio Back's film cannot be viewed as a conventional, political melodrama. Its characters were not designed in the naturalist fashion that gives support to verisimilitude -- so dear to the cinemas that remain faithful to consecrated Hollywood standards. Back belongs to the generation of Cinema Novo filmmakers of the 1960's who faced the risks of dealing with experimentalism. Halleluja Gretchen gathers Brazilian and German characters and depicts their lives in a span of some forty years, in an attempt to demonstrate how much the nazi weltanschaung has survived in our contemporary milieu -- even though we may not always realize it. All characters speak in Portuguese -- even when they were supposedly speaking in German, and no differentiating accents are ever used. That narrative device creates a eerie atmosphere, in which the familiar sounds of the Portuguese language (to the Brazilian audiences) may eventually be perceived as a disguise for something else we were actually not supposed to understand. In the final sequence, which takes place during Carnaval celebrations, nazi officers don their (authentic) uniforms -- and the people surrounding them do not realize these are not costumes. Thus the difficulty to frame the film in a specific genre -- for it borders several genres: historical, political, spy, horror.
Reviews
2 Reviews
Happy Together
(1997)
Cinema of poetry
21 October 2002
Aw-kommon's notes on "Happy Together" are typical of those who cannot approach a film without aligning it with definite paradigms and secure standards. In this case, the paradigm is "Midnight Cowboy" -- a film that belongs to a totally different genre, was written and shot according to "naturalistic" procedures of Hollywood commercial cinema and, most of all, deals with romance from a quite different perspective. In "Midnight Cowboy" redemption of homoeroticism comes through death, a strategy that was quite revealing of the morals that prevailed at the time the movie was produced. "Happy Together", on the other hand, deals with romance as if it could have been homo-, hetero- or whatever, and even though homoeroticism is such an essential element to the narrative, the protagonists'love affair is a pretext for the emergence of their decentered identities, their search for love and friendship and, most important, it ends on a note of hope of future encounters. All that in a poetic tone, one that demands a continuous esthetic reconstruction, hardly understood (or accepted) by those who are encapsulated in a world of conventional filmmaking.
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