The journey is the point, basically :) The scenes with the fellow "refugees" are great, insightful glimpses into Brasil, into that 1970s Brasil in particular. They don't need to lead anywhere in particular for me to enjoy it.
That being said, I did like Bacurau and Aquarius more than The Secret Agent. But that speaks more to how incredible those films are.
Or maybe the newspapers used it to write about things that couldn't be written.
That's a very plausible interpretation. I grew up hearing about this myth :p
My take home at the end was that it was supposed to show the audience that the story was recreated from the parts of the story that could be pieced together by the future journalists. Basically it felt meandering because it was meandering to the journalists trying to figure out what happened. The ending with the son was the journalist trying to tie everything together for herself but he just didn’t have the information. Still dissatisfying.
And it is meant to feel meandering cause that is how this period feels for people trying to study it. There are many cases that we don't know what happened. We just know that the people were killed/disappeared. The perpetrators were never brought to Justice. We are not even sure who the specific perpetrators are in a lot of cases.
This is how the Brazilian military dictatorship operated. There are people in Brazil who want to go back to this period. They say that everything was better. The truth is that a lot of stuff that was bad, was so bad that we don't even have the records to properly reconstruct what happened.
Reminds me of something.
Yeah, so I had to lookup the leg after watching the movie. My interpretation was that it wasn't actually really surrealism. They juxtapose that scene with the lady reading from the newspaper about the attacking leg as if it was real. The reason I think this supports the "from the future journalist's perspective" interpretation is that those were legitimate articles ran, while there were serious cases not being reported on things like people going missing by the dictatorship. I think they included it to show the absurdity of what information was available and what information wasn't in the papers from that time. Also because of the lore of it all.
Excellent aesthetics though but I am less sensitive to that
Brazil has so much to catch up compared to Argentina, which jailed most of the generals. This one tries it differently, not directing the blame directly, but one bystander who took advantage. Much better than I'm Still Here. But the Argentinian fascism era movie are much better still. El bunaerense, Crónica de una fuga,...