Behind the Sun
Screening: 28 April 2003
Brazil/France/Switzerland 2001 (subtitles)153 minutes
Directed by Walter Salles
Leading players – José Dumont, Ravi Ramos Lacerda, Rodrigo Santoro.
Synopsis
The story behind this film hinges on the relationship between two families who live in the isolated, rural area of Bahia in northern Brazil. The Breves are chronically poor and live a harsh, custom bound life of constant toil as they try to eke out a living making molasses from sugar cane.Following an ancient dispute over land, they have been feuding with the Ferreiras for years, longer than anyone can remember and the film opens with the image of a blood-stained shirt hanging on a line. This is a feud which has claimed the lives of many sons on both sides and the current truce will last only until the shirt is bleached by the sun. Pacu, the youngest of the three Breves sons, watches as his elder brother Tonho deals with the prospect of death. But then Tonho meets a girl and he begins to think it will be possible to escape his fate.
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When Salles read Ismail Kadaré’s novel “Broken April”, set in the Balkans during the 1930s, he recognised the classical nature of the tale and realised he could transpose it to the badlands of Brazil with no loss of impact. Only after starting work on the project did he discover that blood feuds lasting 80-100 years were rife in the north-eastern territories of Brazil up until the early twentieth century. Research revealed that mothers used to hang out their sons’ blood-stained shirts as a reminder that revenge was due and thus “Behind the Sun” came together.Despite the film’s many clichés – the yoked oxen representing the stoical peasants, the mill wheel symbolising the relentless round of drudgery, the tree swing emphasising the child’s fantasies and even a travelling circus offering a way out – there is a rich, magical quality, due in no small part to the exquisite cinematography of Walter Carvalho. The images of the pitiless landscape of Bahia burning in the searing heat of the sun, the velvet nights punctuated by the soft light of a candle stay with the viewer long after the movie has ended.
The director worked with the minimum of artificial light, a small crew, several non-professional actors and cameramen who had not previously made a feature film – all in an attempt to find a new way of seeing things, “a more open, less dogmatic vision of things”, as he says. Whether he has succeeded in this aim is open to question but, nevertheless, “Behind the Sun” is a stirring, intense, poetic fable told with remarkable assurance.
