Bacurau: My favourite anti-racist fable
Mullets, bandits and psychedelic plants: a love letter to a film about a community in resistance
Contains mild spoilers
Over the past month, since the wave of racist anti-immigrant rioting across England, several of the freelance projects I’ve been working on have had me buried deep in a wormhole: reading about the histories of racism and fascism in the UK, as well as the history of organised resistance to both.
While it’s a slightly grim topic, there’s something strangely liberating about discovering that every time far-right movements have reared their ugly heads in the UK, there have always been communities and movements willing to resist them.
There are so many moments we can point to: from the much written-about days of the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 — when trade unionists, socialists and anarchists from east London’s Jewish and Irish communities came together to defeat Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists — to the Battle of Lewisham in 1977 (‘battles’ feature prominently in the history of anti-fascism) when communities in southeast London rallied to prevent the National Front marching through their neighbourhood. In recent decades, there have of course been numerous mobilisations against groups like the EDL and Britain First.
Though my reading has focused on the UK, some of it has taken me to international contexts, including resistance to fascism in Spain by the International Brigades during the late 1930s, and protest movements against the right-wing dictatorships in South America from the 1970s onwards.
I’ve also been thinking about how these themes have been represented in culture, particularly in film. The movie that keeps coming up for me is not from the UK but from Brazil, which has its own long and brutal history of racism and fascism. I’m referring to 2019’s Bacurau - Kleber Mendoça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ masterpiece that is equal parts siege thriller, acid western and political allegory. While the film is specific to the social, racial and political complexities of Brazilian society (and there are no doubt nuances and references which, as a non-Brazilian, I’m missing) it’s also a story with universal appeal: a close-knit community under attack and defending itself from aggressors.
Bacurau takes place in the sertão, the arid backcountry of the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. The titular village is a humble but egalitarian community where the scarce resources (water, food, medicine) are shared amongst the inhabitants so that no one goes without. Like the majority of Brazilians, the inhabitants are a range of ethnicities and a mix of Black, Indigenous and European. It’s also a very accepting community, where sex workers and gender non-conforming people are fully integrated. As Plinio, one of the village elders and a sort of unofficial community spokesperson puts it at the beginning of the film: “In our family, there are bricklayers and scientists. Teachers and doctors. Architects, gigolos and whores. But not a single thief”.
Plinio gives this speech close to the beginning of the film, during the funeral of Carmelita, Plinio’s mother and the matriarch of the village. During these opening scenes, we get introduced to several of the village’s inhabitants and key characters. There’s Plinio himself; his daughter Teresa, who is returning to Bacurau after spending time away; Pacote, a local bandit; and Domingas, a cantankerous doctor, who despite her drunken antics at Carmelita’s funeral, is revealed to be somewhat of a caretaker for the village, who lets people sleep off their hangovers in her surgery’s medical beds.
Interestingly, though the film starts from the perspective of Teresa, and traces her return to the village with a suitcase full of medical supplies, she is not the main character. The film largely does away with the concept of a protagonist, depicting the village — with its principles of kinship, mutual aid and solidarity — as a character in itself.
In interviews, the directors have stated that the village of Bacurau is based on the idea of a “remixed quilombo”, a quilombo being a Brazilian version of a maroon settlement, in which enslaved people fled their captivity during the colonial period and formed their own communities. These were often in harsh and inhospitable environments such as mountains, forests or swaps. (The largest and longest-surviving quilombo in Brazil, Palmares, was made up of several thousand people and existed for almost a century before it was eventually subdued by the Portuguese in 1694.)
Implicit in the depiction of Bacarau then is a history of resistance, cultural isolation from the region around it, and social banditry. There are several bandits featured in the film. These include Pacote — who is shown conducting robberies in a motorbike helmet through a series of lurid tabloid-style TV clips, but is also one of the first to realise the village is in danger — but most notably Lunga, a queer, jewellery-clad antihero who has been living in exile but returns to Bacurau after discovering it is under attack. Lunga also sports one of the most glorious mullets ever put to film. These bandits hint at northeastern Brazil’s history of cangaçeiros, armed outlaws who roamed the sertão, often in elaborate dress, who were sometimes aided and supported by the local peasantry, to whom they redistributed some of their spoils.
On an aesthetic level, there are so many other things I love about the film, such as the psychedelic references (many of Bacurau’s inhabitants some kind of mysterious plant which seems to bind them together and give them powers of premonition) as well as the John Carpenter references: the score is heavy with Carpenter-esque synths, the film is full of horror and thriller tropes, and even the village school (Escola João Carpintero) is named in his honour.
Now on to the villains. The antagonists in the film are a nasty little band of constantly squabbling invaders led by Michael (masterfully played by Udo Kier), who many of the other characters hint may have been a Nazi in a previous life. Michael leads a group of Europeans, North Americans and southern Brazilians, on a twisted poverty safari, where they intend to hunt the inhabitants of Bacurau, who they see as innately inferior, for sport. Though in some ways these characters are a bit cartoonish and thinly drawn (“I came for the body count!” yells one, who is obsessed with vintage firearms) they are also in the crosshairs of the film’s fascinating interrogation and decentering of whiteness.
In one pivotal scene, the attackers discuss whether two southern Brazilians who have accompanied them (who insist they are of European heritage) are actually ‘white’ or not. The arrival of these two characters in Bacurau, dressed in garish multicoloured motorbike outfits is the first sign that something is up.
“We come from the south of Brazil. It’s a very rich region with German and Italian colonies. More like you guys”, says the male Brazilian, to which a middle-aged American replies: “Like us? They’re not white, are they? How could they be like us? We’re white. You’re not white.” A younger guy pitches in with: “They look white, but they’re not. The lips and nose give it away. More like white Mexicans really.”
In this one brief exchange, the narrative of racial dominance upon which these aggressors are justifying their murderous rampage is revealed to be inherently unsteady and fictitious. If white people can’t even decide what whiteness is, the whole edifice of their supposed racial hierarchy crumbles very quickly. This scene shows how whiteness (which is so rarely interrogated in Western cinema) has always been historically contingent, its definitions continually fought over. (In a North American context groups such as the Irish and Italians have often had to prove their whiteness in the face of WASPy hostility.)
I don’t want to reveal too much about the ending of the film (though rest assured, there’s plenty of blood). What I will say is that the community depicted in Bacurau — built on principles of solidarity, mutual aid, care and acceptance — represents not just an alternative model of social organisation, but one which offers formidable resistance to those seeking to deny their humanity.