Three Summers <img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/ios-glyphs/20/000000/star.png"/><img src="https://img.icons8.com/windows/21/000000/star-half.png"/>

Three Summers

Three Summers (or Três Verões) is a film that deals with the corruption and class-based deprivation that seems to be rife in Brazil these days. The film, directed by Sandra Kogut, positions itself in the luxury mansion and resort style grounds of a filthy rich family and takes place over three summers (clearly). The neat trick is that it removes the family from the film in short order and leaves us with the staff - cooks, grounds-keeper, maids, dogsbodies and the head caretaker, Madá, played with near-annoying verve by Regina Casé.

Chasing up unpaid wages takes up most of their time but Madá sets about coming up with ways to make the mansion pay off. She runs boat tours of the bay (pointing out all the houses of crims - noting that if they punters can see someone at the house, they're most likely 'foreigners or football players'). The staff ransack the family clothes and heirlooms for a garage sale. The house is offered in a kind of Air BnB set-up and is even somehow rented out as a set for some cheesy looking info-tainment TV show.

The characters keep the interest (there's a nice turn by the patriarch of the family who joins Madá in her exploits) and the pace holds firm without many ebbs. It's no world beater but for a sly, caustic stab at the Brazilian establishment, Three Summers is a pretty good way to spend some film time.

Three Summers is showing at the Luna in Perth.

See also:

Walter Salles' Central Station (1998) is another fine Brazilian film, and Two Days, One Night (2014), directed by the Dardenne Brothers, deals with similar themes.

Comments

Two Prosecutors

This Stalinist 'thriller' sets out its stall early, with a snowy prison yard holding our attention (or not) for a good few minutes. Prisoners are herded in, most very old and on the verge of pegging it. One such geezer is tasked with burning hundreds of letters to Josef himself, pleading with him to hear their case. The old guy saves a letter written in blood and so begins the story. The note is from an ex-academic, party member and proud Bolshevik, asking to see someone from the prosecutors office. Enter Kornev (Alexander Kuznetsov), newly appointed and eager. His meeting with the ancient political prisoner, Stepniak (Alexsandr Filippenko) opens his eyes to the creeping dread of the times. Kornev makes the trek to Moscow to see the Procurator General (Anatoliy Beliy) to make his case against NKVD corruption brough to his attention by Stepniak. It's not an easy mission. The bureaucracy and interminable fucking waiting throughout the first two acts of the film would make Kaf...

The Voice of Hind Rajab

The Voice of Hind Rajab is a very confronting film that uses real emergency recordings to tell the story of Hind Rajab, a 6 year old Palestinian girl trapped under siege in northern Gaza in early 2024. Tunisian writer/director Kaouther Ben Hania apparently paused work on another film when she heard the audio of the calls between Hind and the Palestine Red Crescent Society in order to get this film made. And it's a timely reminder of the crimes of this current Israeli government. The film starts in the offices of the Red Crescent, a West Bank based rescue agency, when Omar (Motaz Malhees) gets a call from a man in Germany explaining that his family are stuck in a car that's been attacked. Omar contacts a young woman in the car but is cut off by the sounds of gunfire. When the call is reconnected, it's soon discovered that the only person still alive in the car is a 6 year old girl, Hind. The sole way to save her is to coordinate with the Israeli army, via the Red Cross to a...

The Quiet Girl

This is a great film, especially in the way that it manages to create something interesting out of a reasonably mundane synopsis. A young girl is sent away to a relative's house for the summer where she is treated better than at home. Sounds like it could have a bit of Rohmer-style youthful awakenings? Or maybe some gritty Loach-ian societal comment? Even perhaps a revenge tinged 'fear the youth' theme? Well, it's none of the above, and more power to its style. The Quiet Girl herself (Cáit) is a newcomer, Catherine Clinch, and she was apparently found via an Irish language school call out. She's incredible - meek, direct, no airs nor graces whatsoever, with a clear-eyed awkwardness. She's almost like a little female Bowie in The Quiet Girl Who Fell to Earth (no, not a film but I thought I'd italicise anyway). There are orbiting performances that complement her perfectly. Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennet play Eibhlín and Seán Cinnsealach, the couple who tak...

Ainbo: Amazon Princess

A young Amazonian girl bounding around on a tree like Mowgli in The Jungle Book opens this Peruvian/Dutch/German co-production. We soon discover that this is the Ainbo of the title, and that her best friend, Zumi, is about to be crowned leader of their tribe. A relatively quick whip- round of characters introduces us to the two leads; a smarmy village thug called Atok; Zumi’s father and current tribal chief, Huarinka; Ainbo’s foster mother, Chuni; as well as two ‘loopy’ spirit guides, Dillo and Vaca (a bespectacled armadillo and a clumsy tapir). The environmental theme is also introduced early on, in the form of dying fish and disease in the village, attributed to a curse but, as we find out later, the result of something more real, and more troubling. Ainbo is convinced by her spirit guides to embark on a trek to find a magical root that will save the village. On her journey she must deal with various perils, ranging from a pursuing Atok, and a gigantic sloth in his volcano home, t...

We Bury the Dead

I went along to Luna Outdoor last Friday to see a preview of local lad, Zac Hilditch's Albany shot, Tassie set zombie drama, We Bury the Dead . The premise goes that the US government has accidentally detonated an experimental pulse weapon close to the east coast of Tasmania, killing more than 500,000 people. A side note to this disaster is that some of the dead are rebooting. Daisy Ridley plays Ava, an American physical therapist looking for her husband, who was in Tassie on a work retreat. She volunteers to be part of a body retrieval unit but is told she must not leave Hobart. She meets Clay (Brenton Thwaites) and they manage to cadge a motorbike and hit the road south. On the way, among the rebooted, they run into soldier Riley (Mark Coles Smith), who has his own reasons for being out of the capital. In a Q&A after the film with The Curb's Andrew F. Peirce, Hilditch mentioned that the film started out as a pure grief drama, and zombies were added to the script later. Th...

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

I'm really getting into the 28UoTLCU (28 'Unit of Time' Later Cinematic Universe). This edition is directed by Nia DaCosta, and she picks up the reins from Danny Boyle and slots right into the landscape. The biggest takeaway from The Bone Temple is that Father Figure transference is rife, throughout both of these '28 Years' films, actually. If we choose the obvious link, Spike (Alfie Williams) is passed from parents, Isla (Jodie Comer) and Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) in the first film, onto two polar opposites, Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) and Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell) in this one, and presumably to a certain returnee in the third installment. But there are also other relationships in the film(s) that explore the nature of dependency, and we have to assume writer Alex Garland, DaCosta, and godfather Boyle, have other, real-world settings in mind, not purely in the zombie genre. This manifests in the rapprochement of Dr. Kelson towards the 'infected', s...

Hamnet

Hamnet sounds like something you might take pig fishing but it's actually a fine new film from Chloé Zhao. It looks at how a seismic event in the life of William Shakespeare and, crucially, his wife Agnes, may have contributed to the creation of one of the Bard's most famous plays. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Maggie O'Farrell, and begins with the introduction of Agnes (A.K.A. Anne) Hathaway, played by Jessie Buckley. She's a strong-willed, earthy falconer and more than a match for besotted Will (Paul Mescal), who spies her returning from the woods one day. Will is employed to tutor Agnes's younger brothers and initially takes her for a servant girl, such is her lack of guile and conceit. They eventually get together and are forced into a shotgun wedding, thanks to the beast with two backs. Agnes is a great support for her husband (who, incidentally, is rarely referred to in the film as Shakespeare) and makes a lot of sacrifices to enable him ...

Sirat

Sirat is the fourth film by writer/director Oliver Laxe and it's a bit of a head scratcher, not just about what's going on, but also why? It stars the excellent Sergi López as Luis, a Spanish dad looking for his daughter in the raves of Morocco. Laxe apparently scoured music festivals and street performers' patches to cast the other characters in the film, and he's unearthed some nuggets here. Steffi (Stefania Gadda), Jade (Jade Oukid) and Tonin (Tonin Janvier) stand out, but all of the non-pros certainly feel like they might attend crusty raves in a desert. In its favour, it certainly drops the shock bombs and some of the scenes are extremely tense (there's a bit of mountain road driving, for example, that tightens the knot). But for the most part, I found it noodly, pretentious and lacking cohesion. There were even a couple of scenes that were cut from the middle, allowed to drift away, and Luis's central motivation just disappears off a Moroccan cliff. The s...

David Fincher Top Ten

With Fincher's first feature in 6 years, Mank , due soon, I figured I'd do a top ten of his other films. Conveniently, he's only made ten features, on top of dozens of music 'videos', as well as some TV and a few shorts. But let's focus on the films. 10. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) Where to start? Well, let me say that Benjy is the only Fincher film I hated. Full of heart-felt whimsy attempting depth, it misses just about every mark. This is trite bollocks with very little to raise it, save from the unimpeachable Cate Blanchett. Take her out of it and you're left with a certified steamer. 9. The Game (1997) Not a bad film, and made with some late 90s panache, but it just didn't elevate for me. Not much wrong with the cast, Douglas and Penn are usually watchable at worst. There are the requisite reversals and rug-pulls but maybe that's part of the problem - too much of this malarkey? 8. Alien³ (1992) I don...

Best Films of 2011 to 2020 - End of Decade Report

I realised a few weeks ago that I've been doing the Film Shapes blog since 2011. This got me thinking that it might be a doddle to put together an aggregation of the top tens of each year, a kind of 'best of the decade' list. Not such an easy task. I've had to stretch a mooted ten out to twenty and the order has been troubling me for some days. As it turns out, all these films were actually made between 2011 and 2020, otherwise titles like Inception may have snuck in. Anyway, I'll leave you with this for now and bugger the consequences. 20. Slow West (2015) An odd, melodic Western, directed by John Maclean (of The Beta Band), this has young Scot, Kodi Smitt-McPhee crossing the perilous US west, helped or hindered along the way by their excellencies Michael Fassbender and Ben Mendelsohn. As the title suggests, it's slow-paced but that's what sets it apart from other films of its ilk. Come to think of it, this is a pretty lonely ilk. 19. Bohemian Rhap sody ...

Film Shapes

Search This Blog