Week of September 13, 2006, Issue #569
FILM
Film takes you on the road less travelled
BRIAN GIBSON / brian@vueweekly.com
Not just the road movie, from cross-country finding-yourself trips to travelling buddy flicks, but even the road itself, seems somehow quintessentially American, with our continent’s interwoven ribbons of asphalt, plains stretching beyond the horizon, gas-guzzling masses of cars yearning to break free of the choked highways they must commute each day ...So it’s easy to overlook the roads, and road movies, of the other Americas, our Latin and South cousins. In recent years, to name just a few, there’s been Walter Salles’s heartbreaking trip to the end of the road in Central Station, Alfonso Cuarón’s Mexican love-triangle outing Y Tu Mamá También, and Salles’s boy-to-Che journey, The Motorcycle Diaries.
These films are a little fiercer, a bit more rough-and-tumble than their northern neighbours’, their politics hanging out the window on their dusty, travel-worn sleeve. Much of the tension driving Cuarón’s film, in fact, comes from the startling glimpses at passing lives that were so strikingly removed from the seemingly carefree, concerns of the middle-class urbanites in the car.
Marcelo Gomes’s Cinema, Aspirin & Vultures is a very different kind of road movie. Though the first frame blooms open from white to reveal a truck driver’s face in the mirror and the dusty stretch ahead, there’s little of the road in this film. The driver is Johann (Peter Ketnath), a German in the northeastern hinterland of 1942 Brazil, selling Aspirin. One local man, Ranulpho (João Miguel), who gets a lift with him, stays and becomes his assistant in the hope of getting to Rio.
Cinema, Aspirin & Vultures is really a film about the odd couple’s slow, awkward bond, and the landscape vanishes from the frame as Gomes focuses on Johann, who’s left his warring homeland to take nomadic refuge as a travelling pitchman in the desert lands of Brazil, and Ranulpho, who wants only to get out of this “backwater” and make something of himself down south in the city.
We see little of the local people in the towns where the pair stop, and there seems to be little narrative spark to the film for most of it. This road movie is more about movies than the road. Johann projects celluloid advertisements for Aspirin on a draped sheet in the towns he passes through, and the rapt audience looks on.
“With this you could sell Bibles to the devil,” Ranulpho says.
Gomes’s own film is largely about cinema itself, too. With so many close-ups of faces half-shrouded by darkness, or people looking off at others, a gleam of light in their pupils, Cinema, Aspirin & Vultures often distills the medium to its essentials: light and image. The camera pans slowly back or the 35mm shots stutter slightly, imitating the brief breaks and jerks in projected films of the time. Dusty or sepia browns and the bleachy whiteness of sun baking earth or glaring through bone-like trees dominate the film’s colour palette.
As Gomes’s movie approaches the final turn-off, we see more and more refugees of the drought in the region—these are the true travellers, weary and hungry folk exiled from their own homes by the whims and hardships of nature, forced to ride trains to Amazon in search of work. And when one of the pair must join them, leaving the other, the tenderness of their friendship becomes tinged with the sad fleetingness of it.
In this way, Cinema, Aspirin & Vultures is about the end of the road, about paths diverging, when travellers’ time together can only be brief. Maybe cinema can best capture, through its strangely haunting, ephemeral, flickering eye, the dreamy briefness of a friendship forged, and forsaken, en route to separate futures. V
Fri, Sep 15 & Sun, Sep 17 (9 pm);
Sat, Sep 16 & Mon, Sep 18 (7 pm)
Cinema, Aspirin& Vultures
Directed by Marcelo Gomes
Written by Gomes,Karim Ainouz,
Paulo Caldas
Starring Peter Ketnath, João Miguel
Metro Cinema, $8