Like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), the Brazilian feature Good Manners (which plays this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center) begins as one type of movie before transforming into something very different. Seeing the film without any foreknowledge of what will happen is to experience one of the greatest jolts in recent cinema, so if you want to get the most out of the movie’s narrative turns, I encourage you to avoid reading any reviews (including this one) before watching it. Suffice it to say that the highly original story is just one of the achievements of Good Manners.. The film is one of the most distinctive looking I’ve seen in some time, with strikingly colorful costumes (by Kiki Orona), production design (by Fernando Zuccolotto), and cinematography (by the great Rui Poças, whose credits include Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, Lucrecia Martel‘s Zama, and numerous works by João Pedro Rodrigues). In fact Good Manners often evokes the animated Disney features of the 1940s in its bold and fanciful use of color; even before writer-directors Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra steer the film in an outlandish direction, it feels like a modern-day fairy tale.
Then things get odd. About a half hour into Good Manners, Clara returns to the high-rise one evening to find Ana sleepwalking around the apartment. The rich woman approaches her servant, sniffs her like an animal, kisses her on the mouth, then bites her lip so hard she bleeds. The next night, Ana wakes from a nightmare and calls Clara into her room; the two become intimate and, acting on their growing mutual fascination, end up making love. When the sex scene ends, Rojas and Dutra bring up the harp-and-flute music on the soundtrack, as if to say that the influence of fairy tales has taken over the film completely. It’s a liberating moment. Ana and Clara’s lovemaking shatters barriers of class, race, and heteronormativity in one fell swoop—it feels as though they’ve granted the movie permission to become anything. Who knows what Ana’s secret could be now?
Directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra. In Portuguese with subtitles. 136 min. Fri 9/14-Thu 9/21. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.
