by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Saturday, October 14
Charles and I screened an interesting Brazilian movie from 2003 called The
Man of the Year, which came out through an
intriguing outfit called filmmovement.com, which among other things runs a
film-of-the-month club in which they send members a new DVD of a foreign-made
or American independent movie. This one turned up in a library sale and the
blurb on the DVD cover compared the movie to the nihilistic Brazilian
masterpiece City of God, but the
two films really have little in common except they’re both set in (or around)
Rio de Janeiro and deal with crime. Directed by José Henrique Fonseca from a
script by Rubem Fonseca (the director’s father) based on a novel called O
Matador by Patricia Melo, the film
begins as a sort of black comedy and ends up being a surprisingly successful
reworking of both classic U.S. gangster films from the early 1930’s (notably Little
Caesar) and some of the most
recent efforts in the same genre (the later reels of The Man of the Year owe quite a lot to the 1983 quasi-remake of Scarface). The central character is a Brazilian nobody
named Máiquel Jorge (Murilo Benecios), who just before the film begins made a
bet on a soccer game with a friend named Robinson (Perfeito Fortuna) in which
he promised that if his team lost Máiquel would have his black hair dyed blond.
(There’s no indication of what Robinson would have had to do if Máiquel’s team
had won.) He goes through with it and immediately falls in love — or at least
lust — with the hairdresser who does his dye job, Cledir (Cláudia Abreu, the
director’s wife and virtually the only person in the cast I’d ever heard of
before), and he asks her out on a date. Only before they get together he stops
at the bar where both he and Robinson hang out, wanting to meet Robinson and
show him he went through with the bet. Robinson isn’t there, but a nasty
character named Suel (Wagner Moura) is. Suel takes an instant dislike to Our
Hero and calls him a “fag,” and Máiquel calls him outside the bar for a fight.
The next day Máiquel grabs a gun and hunts down Suel, shooting and killing him
— Fonseca filho shoots the actual murder
in a rather odd, gauzy style that at first made me wonder if this was just supposed
to be Máiquel’s dream, but no-o-o-o-o, it’s a real story event.
Máiquel, who’s never done anything even
remotely illegal before, is scared shitless that he’ll be arrested for the
murder; instead, everyone in the neighborhood comes up to him and congratulates
him for eliminating such an awful person as Suel, and to Máiquel’s astonishment
even two police officers, instead of apprehending him, shake his hand and
congratulate him for ridding the neighborhood of a particularly nasty crook.
Máiquel finds that killing Suel has made him a hero among his peers, and he
starts a relationship with Cledir that’s somewhat hampered when the late Suel’s
15-year-old girlfriend Erica (Nátalia Lage) turns up on the doorstep of
Máiquel’s apartment and insists that now that he’s killed her boyfriend, it’s
his moral duty to take her in and give her room and board. Also one of the
neighbors brings over a piglet with the intent that Máiquel will keep it for a
while, fatten it up and then make a big celebratory meal out of it. Instead
Máiquel decides to make it a pet, naming it “Bill” after U.S. President Bill
Clinton, who happened to visit Brazil around this time and get himself
photographed on Brazilian TV. He has a bit of a problem with Bill’s (the pig)
penchant for chewing up his sneakers, but for the most part he has a pretty
good life going except when he has to chase out Erica so he and Cledir can have
sex. Máiquel’s next problem comes when he gets a toothache and can’t afford a
dentist; he finds one named Dr. Carvalho (Jorge Dória) who, having heard of
Máiquel’s reputation fro killing Suel, says he’ll treat Máiquel for free — if Máiquel will kill the person Dr. Carvalho believes
dishonored his daughter by raping her. (Later we meet the daughter and,
predictably, she turns out to be the sort of person who will do it with just
about anybody — though Máiquel at least has the good sense to stay out of her
clutches.) Máiquel not only commits the murder but takes over the job at a pet
store the victim was working before he was killed. Carvalho then invites
Máiquel to meet with two of his 1-percenter friends, and the three basically
hire Máiquel to knock off anyone they deem too evil, crooked or just plain
inconvenient to live.
Eventually Máiquel and the gang he puts together to accomplish
these murders, backed by Carvalho and his friends, form what’s ostensibly an
above-ground “private security” company but is really an old-style “protection”
racket, and the company is so sensationally successful that the Rio Chamber of
Commerce names Máiquel its entrepreneur of the year and a song about him, “O
Matador” (obviously comparing him to a bullfighter), becomes a hit. Only if
we’ve seen enough gangster movies in the past we know something is going to derail Máiquel from his ill-gotten success,
and that something is his wife Cledir, whom he married after he got her
pregnant — and he moved in with Cledir and her parents while still keeping his
old apartment as a love-nest with Erica. Cledir asked Máiquel if she could keep
Bill the pig, and one evening Máiquel returns home to find that Cledir has
open-roasted his pet and put an apple in its mouth to serve it. A furious
Máiquel attacks Cledir and bashes her head against the wall, accidentally
killing her. Then he buries the body in the backyard of one of his
confederates. He tries to console himself with Erica, but in the meantime Erica
has been converted by a minister running the Brazilian equivalent of a
mega-church and spouts Biblical verses all day and talks about entering a
convent. (Yeah, right.)
Ultimately Máiquel falls when the man whose backyard he’s buried Cledir’s body
in gets busted by the police for having two kilos of cocaine in his car. The
cops dig up the man’s backyard searching for more drugs, find Cledir’s body,
put two and two together and go out to arrest Máiquel — only in the meantime
Máiquel has figured out what’s going on and decides to make his escape by
simply dyeing his hair back to its natural black shade, thinking that the cops
are going to be looking for a blond. The End.
Charles was upset by the ending,
not only by a factual glitch (Máiquel handles the black hair dye with bare
hands — the dye would turn your skin at least temporarily black as well, which
is why all kits for dyeing hair darker contain disposable gloves and any
cosmetologist dyeing someone’s hair would use gloves) but also because one
expects a story like this to end with the cathartic death of the gangster à
la Little Caesar and both Scarfaces. I wondered if I could have thought of a better
ending, and my idea would have been to rip off the 1950 film The Gunfighter: Máiquel is killed by a younger, hungrier punk who
wants to steal his bad-ass “rep,” and the young man who killed Máiquel would in
turn be hailed as a hero and follow a similar story arc until his own demise at
the hands of a still younger gangster who wanted to hijack his rep, and so on … Nonetheless, The Man of the
Year is a refreshing film, even
though it’s a souvenir of a society in which all the conventional moral rules have broken down,
lawbreaking (at least some lawbreaking) is celebrated and both the police and the public at large
have accepted the idea that it takes some amount of extra-legal violence to
protect people against other forms of extra-legal violence. It’s a genuinely
amusing black comedy for the first half and a grim Scarface-like (either one) tale of a psycho gangster
getting his comeuppance in the second, and it’s got at least one intriguing
credit: the music is by Dado Villa-Lobos, whose imdb page identifies him as
“guitar player for Legião Urbano, one of the most important Brazilian rock
bands,” but does not say
whether or not he’s related to the great Brazilian classical composer Heitor
Villa-Lobos. I quite enjoyed The Man of the Year and can only wonder how many other oddball gems
there are in Film Movement’s catalogs!
