Having no payoff is the payoff. After everything that's happened to him, he is killed offscreen and his son, now an adult, doesn't even quite remember him.

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.

Fair enough if you enjoyed it. I'm no stranger to the period or the director's movies and still found this one overly contrived. The tense bits are so engaging that the fantastic/anachronistic felt like it detracted from a great story.

yeah suddenly perna cabeluda was cool but it did feel a bit random :p

I interpreted it as people making up stories so that they didn't have to face the truth.

Or maybe the newspapers used it to write about things that couldn't be written.

The second option. The military dictatorship had an official censorship bureau in place. Proposed news articles had to be run through it before publishing. When some story was barred, it was usual for journal staff to fill its empty slot with something else, like poems, short stories, tall tales, et cetera, that obviously felt out of place. This way people were made aware something that should be there did not make it.

And the people attacked in the weird scene are people that tended to just be dissappeared by police. Gay men. Prostitutes.

> I interpreted it as people making up stories so that they didn't have to face the truth.

That's a very plausible interpretation. I grew up hearing about this myth :p

I did too. It felt like there were a bunch of subplots that never ended up tying together. The leg was the most disappointing to me.

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.

The leg is used both as a urban legend that was told at the region at the time, but also as a metaphor. The surrealist scene where it shows the leg brutally attacking people at night: all the people attacked are prostitutes, gays, etc. People that during the dictatorship the police used to just dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.

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.

>The leg is used both as a urban legend that was told at the region at the time, but also as a metaphor. The surrealist scene where it shows the leg brutally attacking people at night: all the people attacked are prostitutes, gays, etc. People that during the dictatorship the police used to just dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.

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.

That's perfectly nice idea but still doesn't make for a good movie. Making a good movie comes before a nice idea, if a movie is what you're making.

Oh I agree. This was a post-movie rationalization. I think the ending was super frustrating but it was one of those things where after ruminating for a bit, it's like, "okay fine I get it." Maybe, I'm being too charitable to the director. The movie itself was dissatisfying, the reflection on the movie was better.

Your idea of a good movie, you mean to say.

> People that during the dictatorship the police used to just dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.

Reminds me of something.

Part of what it was trying to speak on was how truth and stories were lost during the dictatorship. What you felt was what a lot of Brazilians felt. Like part of them (or movie) was missing and they'll never be whole.

Yes, I was a big fan of Bacurau and it works well as a fable but this one is very grounded historically and even with a basic knowledge of Brazilian history of this era I spent too much time wondering what was happening and why (even though I did understand everything, it's not cryptic either, just the rythm feels a bit off)

Excellent aesthetics though but I am less sensitive to that

I found it the 2nd best movie of the year, right behind House of Dynamite.

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,...