MADAME SATA
Brazil, 2002, 98 minutes, Colour.
Lazaro Ramos, Marcelia Cartaxo, Flavio Bauraqui, Fellipe Marques, Renata Sorrah, Emiliano Queiroz.
Directed by Karim Ainouz.
This Brazilian film is a portrait of a flamboyant character, Joao Francisco Dos Santos (1900-1976). It is the first film from writer-director Karim Ainouz, with a background from Algeria, settled in Brazil, making a number of documentaries, feature films like Future Beach, an architect by training and doing film projects on significant buildings. In 2018, he released a documentary examining the plight of refugees from the Middle East to Germany, interviews as well as extensive filming in the old Templehof airport in Berlin, Central Airport THF.
The bulk of this film is set in the early 1930s. It opens with a close-up of the central character, weary and beaten, listening to a variety of charges against him. He has committed a murder and is sentenced to prison for 10 years. The film shows his life in 1932. At the end of the film, he is released from prison, goes to the Carnevale of 1942, designing his costume, winning a competition – with the film indicating that he continued designing, dancing, winning competitions at the Carnevale, but also continuing to get into trouble, in an out of prison.
He is an indigenous man, very black, put down because of race, being insulted, refused entry into respectable clubs, contributing to his growing in anger. While he lives in a house with a prostitute and her daughter, very protective of them, but also pimping, he is also a gay man. This becomes part of the list of charges against him, his behaviour, his orientation, his language.
He is seen at a nightclub, mouthing the lyrics to a song about Scheherazade and the 1001 nights, going home, repeating the song, enthralled by the singer and her style as well as her costumes. So, there is his transvestite experience, also held against him. While intrigued by the singer (though bullying her because of her treatment of him and taking his earnings from the owner of the club where he worked and later these becoming part of the charges against him), he also watches a musical film of the period, enthralled in watching, a vivid sequence illuminating his very personal attitude towards singing, costumes, and his taking the opportunity in a friend’s club to perform, for the crowds, get great acclamation and personal satisfaction.
In the house there is also a male prostitute, friendly with Dos Santos but also used by him and frequently ridiculed by him. Nevertheless, the prostitute admires him.
His also intrigued by a young man at the club, taking drugs, making an approach to him but seemingly rejected. However, the young man comes to the house, there is mutual attraction and an explicit sexual scene of encounter. Dos Santos thinks the man has robbed him and ousts him – though he later returns and is very supportive while Dos Santos is in jail, but he is shot by the police.
While there are lyrical scenes, the group and the little child going to enjoy themselves at the beach, there are also scenes of anger. This is especially so after a successful performance and a drunken man taunts him about his sexuality, about his performance. The friend who owns the club wants Dos Santos to be careful, thinking of his future performances. However, he goes upstairs, gets a gun and shoots the man in the street.
The film recreates the atmosphere of Rio and the particular neighbourhood with its homes, clubs, prostitution. Whether that makes an impact on universal audiences, it certainly made an impact on Brazilian audiences, some folklore about this very flamboyant and unpredictable character.
