In another shot near the end, when the security specialist Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) and his deputy Fernando (Nivaldo Nascimento) pay a visit to Francisco Oliveira (W.J. In one shot near the beginning, the camera peers down on two teenage lovers furtively making out in the little hallway created by a standing wall that bisects the frame. The building seems oppressive mainly because there are so many long, narrow spaces within it, which Filho exploits masterfully in his wide-screen framing. (Apparently this is what Filho means when he talks about establishing the characters within their environment.) Alone in the laundry room with a jolting clothes washer, she pulls down her panties and mounts the corner of the machine until it brings her to climax. As the kids head off to school, Bia hides in her bedroom with the vacuum cleaner, smoking a joint and blowing her exhaust into the nozzle. Privacy issues creep into the other stories too: After swiping the kids’ binoculars to spy on the dog, Bia has to take them away from her son, who’s studying a neighbor across the alley.
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The building has surveillance cameras everywhere, and the main story line (such as it is) involves an independent security service contracting with the building’s owner to patrol the street below. To this end he’s dispensed with a score and instead uses an ambient soundtrack in which noises from the adjoining units and the street below-TVs, machines, people yelling, etc-maintain a low boil throughout the movie. She orders a high-frequency siren that drives the dog away, and when the maid accidentally breaks it, Bia is so stressed by the howling that her children have to massage her back and feet.įilho understands that, in the city, privacy means not only protecting your personal life from other people but protecting your mental space from theirs. She cranks the Queen song “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” but the howling seeps in between the rests in the music. She presses some pills into a piece of raw meat, tosses it through the slatted window that separates them from the back patio of the building next door, and knocks the dog out for a while. Any means of resolving the problem seem to have been exhausted already, and Bia’s husband and kids have learned to tune out the noise, but it drives her crazy. The family’s unit is near street level, across the alley from another building, and they’re plagued by the owners of a unit directly below and next door to them who leave their dog to howl for hours on end. No character chafes against her environment more than Beatriz (Maeve Jinkings), who lives in one of the condo units with her husband and school-age son and daughter. Nothing much happens in Neighboring Sounds until the very end, yet the tension between the characters and their surroundings accumulates for more than two hours, creating a vague dread. I like opening up the plane, and in this film in particular I very clearly wanted to establish the people within their environment.” The characters’ relationship to that environment can be as vivid-and as fraught-as their relationships with other people. “I can no longer stand watching films where the people are filmed in tight close-up with a shaky-cam. “Shooting wide was extremely important for a film where I wanted viewers to see the architecture,” Filho explained recently to Aaron Cutler of Cinema Scope.
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Distinguishing him from Altman, though, is a sure grasp of how people try to define-and are more often defined by-the spaces they inhabit.įilho shot the movie in his own neighborhood, where single-family homes have been giving way to tightly clustered condominium towers, and there are striking wide-screen frames of both the exploding skyline and the constricted spaces where residents sit stacked on top of one another. Writer-director Kleber Mendonca Filho, making his feature debut after a handful of shorts and a documentary, has drawn comparisons to Robert Altman for his weaving together of many characters inside and around a middle-class high-rise in a suburb of Recife, the capital city of Pernambuco. I may be particularly sensitive to this flaw because I’ve also just watched Neighboring Sounds, a Brazilian drama with a powerful and enveloping sense of place that begins a weeklong run on Friday at Gene Siskel Film Center. The digital long shots of 19th-century Paris look phony, and because director Tom Hooper ( The King’s Speech) likes to close in on his warbling actors, the inky interiors seldom register. This weekend I had the unhappy experience of catching up with Les Miserables, which suffers from more problems than I can detail here but notably-and fatally for a period picture-lacks much sense of place.
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