O MATADOR/ THE KILLER
Brazil, 2017, 99 minutes, Colour.
Diogo Morgado, Will Roberts, Etienne Chicot, Maria de Medeiros.
Directed by Marcelo Galvao.
This is a brutal and grim Western – but a Brazilian Western, a Brazilian version of spaghetti Western with whatever culinary title would be appropriate.
The film is very distinctive in its north Brazil desert settings, the small towns, the outlying houses, and the contrasting mansions of the wealthy. The story opens in 1910 but the main action taking place in the 1930s and 1940s – various glimpses of bikes, cars, planes, but still very much looking like a 19th century landscape and situation.
The film opens with a man travelling with two children, today in by suspicious looking types, telling them here’s good at telling stories. And he does, meaning that the film relies on the narrative voice-over to help audiences know what is going on (and, it is often quite complex and difficult to follow), the action and characters just dramatising what has been said.
The film focuses on abandoned baby, cared for by a gunslinger Seven Years (a bizarre necklace of seven years from his victims). The boy grows up in isolation. When Seven Years leaves and doesn’t return, the boy ventures into the world, experiencing violence instantly, puzzled by pressures stones but eager to have them, discovering sex with prostitutes. He also confronts the local landowner, a ruthless Frenchman, with an aristocratic wife and a dilettante his son. The killer has no hesitation in shooting people and is soon employed by the Frenchman to kill off all rivals and those who refuse to sell that land to him.
Then, there is something of a D talk, a focus on a landowner whose wife and child are brutally killed (the treatment of women in the film is harsh and misogynistic) and seeks revenge, confronting the dapper lead rest bespectacled, continually washing his hands, administrator of the law. And he is brutal to his wife and cousin. Eventually, confrontations, shootings, and the landowning Frenchman asserting himself.
The latter part of the film, the killer discovers that he has a young son, awkward in dealing with him, the son wanting to accompany his father, growing dangers, the father putting his son on a train to the furthest destination, a shootout and his being wounded.
And, with a twist, it emerges that the narrator of the story is that son.
Of casting interest, the killer is played by Portuguese actor, Diogo Morgado, who was quite effective as Jesus Christ in The Bible television series and in the edited film version, Son of God. The Frenchman’s wife is played by Maria de Medeiros, prominent in many films over the decades, including Pulp Fiction.
For audiences interested in the variety of westerns, especially those outside the United States, but may bewilder to women violent for ordinary audiences.
