Xingu

A compelling and gorgeously shot tale of three real-life brothers who were instrumental in the protection of indigenous Indian tribes in Brazil, Xingu, directed by Cao Hamburger (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation), tells a little-known and important tale, but suffers somewhat from trying to cover 18 years of story in 102 minutes. The film tells the tale of the Villas-Bôas brothers, Orlando, Claudio and Leonardo, who started out leading the charge of colonization across central Brazil, but fell in love with the diversity and richness of the Indian tribes they found there and instead led the charge to protect them from the impact of colonization by Whites.

Ultimately Claudio and Orlando Villas-Bôas were responsible for the creation of Xingu National Park, an indigenous-only park in central Brazil in 1961. It’s a tale of breathtaking scope, and one that American audiences are probably completely unfamiliar with, and it’s particularly relevant given that the continued deforestation in the Brazilian rainforest (problematic in and of itself) increasingly encroaches on diverse and unique way of life the tribes residing within the preserve have maintained.

There are moments in the film that feel like some storytelling was lost in the editing room. For instance, early on we see Claudio and Leonardo lie about their intelligence and literacy in order to get accepted into the military group that’s going to explore central Brazil, but we don’t know why they’re lying, and there’s never a reason given for why they wouldn’t have just enlisted by saying, “Hey, we have these skill sets, and I’d like to join this expedition.” And yet, in spite of presenting themselves as illiterate peons (unskilled laborers) to be a part of the expedition, when we next see them they are leading it. We see an officer who looks gloweringly suspicious of the brothers as they enlist, which foreshadows his involvement later, but this never really pays off later even when he reappears.

More problematic, we’re never given any real clue as to what, other than a sense of adventure, drove the three brothers to abandon educations and established careers to go exploring rainforests, nor any sense of what in their upbringing might have later driven the three to lead the charge to protect the indigenous tribes they found there, and this is really what should be the heart of the story. This is a tale about three brothers, without whose passion these tribes would have just been plowed over by all the greedy white men who followed; their savvy use of PR and their ability to convince others to balance economic interest with cultural concern and preservation led to the creation of something that would not exist without them! Show us what drove these men, other than falling in love with Indian women. The film jumps forward in time a lot, presumably because there’s a lot of ground to cover here, but in covering all this ground the character development, even of the three main characters, is thinly sliced; secondary characters are so undeveloped as to mostly feel like props, and the female characters, such as there are, are given nothing to do but stand around topless and demure.

Those issues aside – and they are not small issues, unfortunately – Xingu is still worth seeing for its subject matter and the beauty with which it’s shot. If nothing else, watching Xingu might inspire you to learn more about the Villas-Bôas brothers, the indigenous tribes of Brazil, the difference between Xingu National Park and the Native American reservations in the US, and why its important to preserve one of the last places on earth mostly untouched by modernization.

The Villas-Bôas brothers believed that Brazil’s indigenous tribes would eventually be “civilized” and become a part of Brazilian society, but that they should be left to do this in their own way, in their own time, with their culture and heritage preserved as much as possible. Here’s hoping that, with Fernando Meirelles’ name attached as a producer, enough people in Brazil who have the influence to make that happen will see this story and be inspired, as the Villas-Bôas brothers were in their time, to preserve the beauty and diversity of their indigenous peoples.

The Art of Love

Emmanuel Mouret’s The Art of Love isn’t quite as Woody Allen as the writer-director seems to want it to be, but most of the time it works quite nicely for what it is. Mouret (Please, Please Me and Shall We Kiss) uses a series of loosely interconnected vignettes to explore human relationships by showing us glimpses of their lives in various stages of romantic crises.

Three of the vignettes stood out among the rest: The first, a story about an older couple whose long-term marriage is suddenly threatened by the woman desiring other men, and how the pair deal with that, was touching and heartrending and beautifully acted. I also greatly enjoyed a longer episodic tale that was interspersed with the others about a man and his sexy new neighbor and the way they dance around their attraction to each other; the subtext of these, which is as much about the way in which people communicate as it is about sexual attraction, rings very true. And the final vignette, longer than the others, really could stand alone as a short or be expanded into a feature; it’s a farcical tale of a man who’s sexually attracted to a female friend, and what happens when she agrees to have sex with him in a dark hotel room, but sends another friend in her place.

Taken as a whole, The Art of Love doesn’t always work, though; these kind of episodic vignettes where things are loosely tied together around a theme has to be really spot-on for the whole to work together seamlessy, and that click never really happens here. If you view The Art of Love more as a package of individual shorts, as it were, with a Woody Allenesque voiceover in a sexy French voice, it’s quite enjoyable overall, and it’s certainly worth sticking around for that last segment.

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