Bryan Miller
Fernando Coimbra’s darkly comic, deeply cynical neo-noir Carnival Is Over (Os Enforcados) sets the tone in the opening frames with a wry parody of a hackneyed establishing shot. It’s practically codified—especially in American cinema—that any jaunt to Brazil at large and Rio de Janeiro in particular must begin with an image of the Christ the Redeemer statue opening his arms to the city on the coastline below. It’s as indelible as Big Ben in London or the pyramids of Giza.
Coimbra begins with the familiar pan down from the sky to the glimmering ocean, only to land on a grotesque icon, a statue of a leering cartoon oaf with a look in his eyes and an odd crook in his outstretched arms that seems anything but redemptive. It’s a funny little intrusion of the profane in the sacred. This first few moments are also the apex for the movie’s dual protagonists, married couple Regina and Valério, who will soon spiral about as far from a heavenly embrace as possible.
Regina (Leandra Leal) is in the midst of overseeing a renovation on their swanky new hillside home, and she has a solution when the movers can’t budge the ugly statue: a sledgehammer. That will turn out to be a representative of her approach to most problems. She and Valério (Irandhir Santos) have recently relocated after years away in Miami, Florida, so he can tend to the family business after the death of his father.
That business: jogo do bicho, aka The Animal Game, an illegal lottery that has remained popular in Brazil, and in Rio in particular, for over 100 years despite its illegitimate status. Valério’s father is one of the bicheiros who ran the regional jogo do bicho, alongside his identical twin brother, Linduarte (Stepan Nercessian). Valério believes his father’s recent suicide was actually a murderous plot by Linduarte to seize control of their shared gambling empire, but Valério is in a financially precarious position in an underworld where he has few friends after living for years in the United States.
The first hour of Carnival Is Over is exceptionally plot-dense; step out for three minutes for a pee break or a popcorn refill and you’re almost guaranteed to miss some essential twist or new character entering into the complex equation. Valério and Regina’s life becomes rapidly more complex with the introduction of rival bicheiros, exhumed graves, and police investigations, but the unraveling threads of his life and business all twine back to his original sin — he’s killed his uncle and buried him in the walls of his remodeled home, and it’s only made matters worse.
One of the great thrills of watching international cinema is encountering unfamiliar narrative structures and modes of storytelling. It’s easy as an American to forget just how baked-in Western European conventions are until you witness the vast array of tones in a Bollywood musical or see an Akira Kurosawa film built around the two-act structure of Noh theater. It’s a jolt of surprise where we’ve been conditioned to expect the familiar.
For that very reason, I kept dismissing the Shakespearean allusions, even as they piled up faster that the bodies in Valério’s wake: the fratricidal uncle of Hamlet, the deadly matrimony of Macbeth’s doomed protagonists, and a grim flourish taken from Titus Andronicus. But no, this wasn’t some Euro-centric bias at play, which I finally came around to when Regina has her own “Out, damned spot” moment during the home renovation. Her dog is even named “Lady,” for Christ the Redeemer’s sake.
Coimbra is drawing heavily on Shakespeare, but he’s not held captive by fidelity to any particular play. Sometimes he dangles a thread it front of you just to snatch it away, as when he teases a bit of Othello before zagging in an entirely different direction. He’s remixing the tropes and drawing on a broader Shakespearean grandiosity, bringing that epic moral scope to what is essentially an intra-family conflict in a lurid way that would make Willy proud.
It works brilliantly. Carnival Is Over isn’t just a standout crime drama, it’s world-class. Leal and Santos are tremendous as co-leads, though it’s Leal who shines the brightest — or the darkest, as it were. Just beneath her languid sensuality (she must spend a third of the movie elegantly draped in silken robes) is a coiled menace that will come as no surprise to anyone who saw her 2013 collaboration with Coimbra, A Wolf At the Door. There’s certainly a bit of femme fatale to Regina, although what makes her most interesting is that she’s more a woman thrown into fatal circumstances, in over her head with her ill-equipped husband and desperately struggling to survive in a city where the only redemption is reserved for the statues.
The Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival features over 200 films from around the world, plus an array of parties, panels, visiting filmmakers, and special guests.
