LGM Film Club, Part 544: Neighboring Sounds

Kleber Mendonca Filho is the great filmmaker of class in Brazil. Bacurau is one of the greatest eviscerations of class and the violence behind the rich in the current era, which is how it ended up on my list of best leftist films for The Nation. Filho’s first film, 2012’s Neighboring Sounds is more about his own class–the middle class. He could have carved out a whole career as the bard of the middle class. This isn’t a class we think a lot about in a place like Brazil, but he’s writing about his own family and neighbors. In fact, it is shot in the apartment where he grew up in Recife. The tension here is about security. Robberies and low level street crime are common. Recife residents are isolating themselves from the street in order to maintain that security. A group of men come and offer their services as the security agents for the street. The wealthiest man in the community–a sugar landowner who also owns a lot of the apartment buildings where the middle class live–approves. His grandson, who is the main protagonist here, is a clueless pretty rich young guy himself who is not a bad guy, but is deeply self-centered. The secondary protagonist is a housewife who battles a dog who will never stop barking (evidently this was also a thing in Filho’s childhood), who pulls out the washing machine to masturbate, and who buys a lot of weed from her water delivery guy. It’s a very sympathetic portrait.

The film feels reasonably low stakes, though a very fine character study. But the final scene, oh it hits hard and really brings the class divisions and historical violence of Brazil home.