This weekend I had the unhappy experience of catching up with Les Miserables, which suffers from more problems than I can detail here but notably—and fatally for a period picture—lacks much sense of place. The digital long shots of 19th-century Paris look phony, and because director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) likes to close in on his warbling actors, the inky interiors seldom register. I may be particularly sensitive to this flaw because I’ve also just watched Neighboring Sounds, a Brazilian drama with a powerful and enveloping sense of place that begins a weeklong run on Friday at Gene Siskel Film Center. Writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho, making his feature debut after a handful of shorts and a documentary, has drawn comparisons to Robert Altman for his weaving together of many characters inside and around a middle-class high-rise in a suburb of Recife, the capital city of Pernambuco. Distinguishing him from Altman, though, is a sure grasp of how people try to define—and are more often defined by—the spaces they inhabit.
The building seems oppressive mainly because there are so many long, narrow spaces within it, which Filho exploits masterfully in his wide-screen framing. In one shot near the beginning, the camera peers down on two teenage lovers furtively making out in the little hallway created by a standing wall that bisects the frame. In another shot near the end, when the security specialist Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) and his deputy Fernando (Nivaldo Nascimento) pay a visit to Francisco Oliveira (W.J. Solha), the snowy-haired sugarcane planter who owns the building and half the block, they walk down a tight exterior hallway decorated with white tile as sensors raise and then dim the outside lights. Every inch of the building is whitewashed, and the effect can be blinding. “Looks like a factory,” says one prospective buyer as she and her daughter are led down a bright exterior walkway by Joao (Gustavo Jahn), who is Francisco’s grandson and the sales manager for the building. Inside the unit, the woman presses Joao about a recent incident in which a tenant leapt from one of the balconies to her death, and asks him to lower the price, insisting the building has a “negative energy.” Joao refuses, promising her, “This place is not haunted.”
Directed by Kleber Mendonca Filho
