Good Manners (Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra, 2018)

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Never Cursed
Such is life on board the Redoutable
Joined: Sun Aug 14, 2016 12:22 am

Good Manners (Juliana Rojas & Marco Dutra, 2018)

#1 Post by Never Cursed » Thu Aug 02, 2018 3:42 pm

zedz wrote:
Sun Aug 05, 2018 10:05 pm
Good Manners (Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra) – This is perhaps the ultimate example of a film of two halves. For the first hour and a bit, it’s a slow-burn mystery about a nanny-housewife’s growing realization that something is wrong with her pregnant mistress (and eventual lover). This section is a well-done mood piece, predicated on the excellent rapport between the two actresses. For the second hour and a bit, the film is completely bonkers.
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The mother was impregnated by a werewolf, and a little werewolf baby was on the way.

It’s not exactly good, but I was full of admiration for the filmmakers’ commitment to the complete change in tone and mood: the film even becomes a musical, for Christ’s sake! You want to see something genuinely weird, here you go.
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Speaking of Portuguese-language horror, those of you with a particular interest in contemporary fantasy should keep Good Manners, a Brazilian werewolf movie, on your radar. This is a fascinating little two-parter about the anxieties of becoming a parent and the sacrifices that parents make as realized through the lens of well-made genre horror, kicked off when a pregnant woman's new live-in maid begins to notice her employer's unnerving behaviors every full moon.
At 135 minutes, it might seem somewhat long for genre horror, but it uses its twists and tonal shifts and haunting musical numbers (captured in beautiful neon colors by Zama's Rui Poças) to fantastically illustrative effect, to the point where the second part of the film threatens to become the nameless fairy tale alluded to in the first part. Ultimately, I found some contrivances of the plot, particularly in the second half, a little hard to buy, and the CG is not particularly good (though the vast majority of the effects are practical, surprisingly), but I'd wager that if you liked The Lure warts and all, then you'd get great mileage out of Good Manners, too. This isn't my favorite film, but it's bound to be someone's idea of a masterpiece.

Go into this movie relatively blind - it depends in part on your ability to be surprised in the larger sense.

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knives
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm

Re: The Films of 2018

#2 Post by knives » Thu Mar 28, 2019 3:59 pm

No offense to Cuaron who made an amazing movie with Roma, but Good Manners is the best film about race, class, and womanhood to come out in a long while. The movie doesn't pussyfoot with the issues under the subtle shade of realism. Instead Dutra and Rojas bear these themes to the naked sun by utilizing the fantastic. The fantastic makes explicit without didactic or histrionic presentation that the nanny-mistress relationship is necessarily intimate, but ultimately at a cost to the nanny. Like Cuaron, whose film I do like very much, Dutra and Rojas make the joy and love of both a real one. Unlike him though they show this relationship to be an unequal one where the love is not equally reciprocal.

Another fascinating shared theme is the violence of men and how that draws women closer. This is a part to the film I had a harder time with. It's actually a pretty complex take thanks to the representation of men here being a baby which comes with the masochistic desire to raise the source of violence. Intellectually it is stimulating and fantastic, but it's not as emotionally well realized as the other main theme. That it comes at the cost of the woman to woman relationship is more than a tad frustrating, but it also comes at a pleasant complication (one that would require spoiler tags to explain).

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