Behind the Sun
New myths from the badlands

By Jonathan Romney

10 March 2002

In a forbidding rural landscape, two families  are engaged  in an  endless feud over contested territory. Each kills a scion of the other, then  a  brief truce  is agreed before the next revenge killing, and  so  the  bloody  circle   rolls   on. Now, which director could have made such a  film,  and  where  could  it  be set? The brothers  Taviani,  in  Sicily  or  Sardinia?  Carlos  Saura,  on  some Iberian plateau? Could it be the Balkans, staged with cartoonish  swagger by Emir Kusturica? Or might it be a Kurosawa saga of war between  rival  clans of medieval Japan? Hands up if you guessed the Balkans: Behind the Sun  is based on a novel by Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré, transplanted by  director Walter Salles to north-eastern Brazil. The transplantation appears effortless – this certainly looks and feels  a  quintessentially  Brazilian  film,  though  these days we don't have many points of reference for that assessment.  Suffice  to say that the visual style of Behind  the  Sun  is  remarkably  close  to  the  last Brazilian film released here, Andrucha Waddington's Me You Them, and not much at all like Salles's own last film, the road movie Central Station.

Salles has hitherto specialised in tough-spirited humanist realism, with  a strong sense of  redemption  and  a  contemporary   state-of-the-nation  
agenda. Set in 1910, Behind the Sun is a flamboyant  departure,  more  brazenly poetic in its ambitions.  Its  stark,  stylised  imagery  aspires  to  
a  mythic dimension: it's no surprise to learn that Kadaré advised  Salles 
to immerse himself in Aeschylus before making the film.

The setting is an arid patch of land situated "somewhere on earth, behind  the sun". The Breves clan make their arduous crust grinding sugar  beet  under  a blazing sun, a monotonous routine broken only by eruptions  of  feuding  with the wealthy Fereiras, who occupy what was once Breves land. 
The arrangement is this: one son from each family gets killed, then  a  truce  is declared until the blood on the dead man's shirt turns yellow; then it all  starts again. There are still a few Fereiras around to keep the cycle  going,  but  the Breves are down  to  the  story's  narrator,  a  young  boy  simply  known  as Meninho   ("Kid"),   his  older  brother  Tonio  (Rodrigo Santoro),  and  their parents.

The cycle starts to break when  the  circus  arrives  in  town – a  plot  device always to be approached with foreboding. Salles,  however,  handles  it  with elegance – for one thing, the circus economically comprises only two people: a boozy, dashing clown (Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos, one of  the  lovers  in  Me You Them) and his beautiful fire-eating step daughter,  Clara  (Flavia  Marco Antonio). When Tonio meets her, the story really takes flight – he joins her in a show-stopping routine, spinning a rope while she whirls  around  in  mid-air for what seems like a day and a night, a dazzling if outrageously overdetermined metaphor for erotic rapture.

You certainly can't fault Salles on the full-bloodedness of his metaphors. This film is big on circles: that spinning routine contrasts with the grimly cyclical life of the Breves family, embodied by the literal grind of their  ox-powered  mill. The single most powerful image is the white shirt, suspended Christ-like on a line, its stains bleaching in the sun – an icon of natural timekeeping and  a brutally masculinised parody of menstrual blood. Such images, it must be said, are a little schematic, but then that fits Salles's interest in archetypes; 
in fact, one of the film's strengths is that it makes no lip-service to conventional character. Meninho (Ravi Ramos Lacerda, engagingly  pensive, with a prematurely middle-aged look of Ben Gazzara) is  a  spirited  lad  with dreams; Tonio a dashing bold boy with a will to escape and a sense  of  duty that holds him back; their father grim and hardened; their mother compassionate but careworn;  Clara  the  fire-eater  simply,  as  the  subtitles concisely put it, "hot stuff". Yet  the  starkly  conveyed  situations  sometimes edge into romantic cliché: in a story about an arid world, it's  too  predictable that the climax should happen in a rainstorm, and  that  the  final  shot  should give us a billowing ocean. The truly memorable moments are less to  do  with staging than with atmosphere or plain dramatic  tension:  notably,  the  Sergio Leone-like sequence where a dying man crawls  like  a  lizard  across  sandy ground.

By comparison, the detailed reconstructions of the hard rural  life  feel  rather dutiful and make  the  film  somehow  less  specific – more  like your generic, painstakingly   researched   historical  epic.  The  recreation of the  sugar  mill yields its striking images – flies hovering round molten caramel,  slabs  of raw sugar like antiquarian books  on  a  merchant's  shelf.  But  somehow  I  kept being reminded of other films from other parts of the world that had undertaken similarly elaborate  reconstructions:  for  example,  of  the  dyeing plant in Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou (Walter Carvalho's photography of shafts of daylight in dark sheds also seems straight from the Chinese school).

Somehow Behind the  Sun lacks  absolute  distinctiveness  or  any  sense of surprise: it looks exactly as you'd imagine a story of the Brazilian badlands to look. Everything looks sun-parched and burnished,  earth  and  bodies  alike, and the film is full of the standard imagery of folk-vendetta cinema – earth-stained shirts  and  grizzled  beards,  headscarves  tautly  knotted  over concerned brows. And it does  superficially  resemble  Me You Them  to  an uncomfortable degree – similar exaggeratedly russet landscapes  and  intense blue skies, similar evocation of torrid weather and torrid  sentiments.  Though Salles's film is markedly less ingratiating.

Neither  Central  Station   nor   its   predecessor  Foreign  Land  remotely confirmed one's prejudices  of  what  Brazilian  cinema  might  be; Behind the Sun, however, plays too easily into marketable ideas of world cinema. 
This is in fact a Miramax film and perfectly  fits  that  company's  aesthetic  of solid narrative, high production values, with nothing too culturally specific that might alienate an international  niche  audience.  But  given  the  exciting  new avenues recently  explored  in  Latin  American  cinema,  notably  in  Mexico (Amores Perros, the forthcoming Y Tu Mamé También) and Argentina (the ominous, dream-like La Cienaga), Behind the Sun looks distinctly old-school.

Salles is a virtuoso film-maker and a serious-minded one, and overall Behind the Sun's folk tragedy is  engrossing  and  cathartic.  And  there's  something laudable in wanting to narrate a universal myth that might  convincingly  stand as metaphor for just about any territorial conflict on the current world  scene. But ultimately, Behind  the  Sun  has  no  new  vision  to  impart,  simply  that extended warfare is tragic and futile. Surely a new century calls for something more specific, more local, more incisive?