BARREN LIVES (1963)

A.K.A.: Vidas Secas

Country: Brazil

Genre(s): Drama

Director: Nelson Pereira dos Santos

Cast: Atilia Iorio / Maria Ribeiro / Jofre Soares

Plot

After wandering through the desert, an impoverished family takes up residence in an abandoned house on the land of a wealthy rancher, agreeing to raise livestock for him.  However, just as their fortunes seem to be improving, temptation and injustice intervene.

What I Liked

*spoiler alert*

If you’re ever feeling like things are going bad for you, go ahead and take a gander at “Barren Lives” and you’ll realize you’re pretty lucky.  The movie basically plots one family’s move from absolute desperation to base poverty back to desperation.  And the film’s visuals overall match the desolation of its plot.  There is almost no musical soundtrack, outside of at an extended night-time festival scene and the occasional screeching drone of rusty cart wheels.  The landscapes and interior shots are the very definition of bleak.  The starkness of the black-and-white photography gives a skeletal pallor to nearly every person and animal on screen.  To this American viewer it all seems like an alien or post-apocalyptic world; however, I fully acknowledge this misses the film’s point.  Places like this, and worse, exist and have rarely been documented in a fictional film with such stomach-churning precision.

I remember reading a book called “Child of the Dark” in college.  It was the diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, a desperately poor mother in the urban favelas of Brazil.  Though “Barren Lives” covers a more rural setting, it reminded me very much of that book in its shocking account of how harsh life can be.  The very real Carolina Maria de Jesus would scrounge the streets for paper to write on and knowingly drank from disease-infected well water to survive.  Similarly, the fictional family here kills their pet bird for something to eat so they can have the energy to keep walking a path to nowhere and, when they finally find shelter, sleep on an uncovered bed made of sticks.  Their mother constantly fantasizes about one day being able to afford to cover the sticks in leather, equating this with living like dandies.  There’s no Hollywood happy ending here.  No inspirational moral, outside of sheer outrage at the injustice of it all.  This film is simply the hardest of facts, even if its characters are fictional.

From the standpoint of art, director Nelson Periera dos Santos makes some excellent use of camera angles to get some interesting visuals.  For example, he jumps from a wide-open shot of a pathetically empty, dust-blasted town square to the sight of a group of bandits traveling down the street, seen through the frame of a barred prison window.  These help keep the eyes slightly entertained through what is otherwise an intentionally unembellished film.

What I Didn’t Like

In case the above didn’t give you a clue, you won’t find any inspiring tale of redemption, rags-to-riches, or poetic justice here.  Nor will you find anything resembling bright colors, happiness, brotherhood, romance, or even an entertaining action sequence.  No escapism here.  Just bare-bones ugliness for over an hour and a half.  If you intend to watch this one, prepare yourself.

Just as the story lacks Hollywood convention, so does the plot structure.  This makes the film difficult to watch in another way.  Our minds are trained to recognize certain queues and signs that mark well-established plot points, twists, and elements.  Without realizing it, we take this language of American film for granted and it helps use stay interested and involved in the happenings on screen.  “Barren Lives,” lacks a great deal of that structure and thus very often feels to be without a narrative altogether.  This impression is in error, and the film does have a well-defined plot, it just neither conforms to or resembles those which we are accustomed to watching.  The movie therefore is difficult to watch intellectually as well as emotionally.

Most Memorable Scene
*spoiler alert*

Once the viewer realizes how quickly the meager success the family has attained is going to leave them, a feeling of inevitable defeat pervades.  This begins when Fabiado, father of the family, pulls out of a card game in which he knows he’s been had, offending the policeman with whom he partnered for the game.  This event brings about the downfall of all that the family has worked toward for a year, and they can only helplessly watch it all take place. Unsettling stuff.

My Rating: 3 out of 5