Insomniacs rejoice! The cure for your affliction has been found residing in the contents of this 1963 film from director Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Often regarded as the masterpiece of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, Vidas Secas (a.k.a. Barren Lives) rivals only such pictures as Jackie Chan’s Project A: Part II (1987) and Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) as sure fire snore inducers from the 1001 list. The book’s text reveals that the picture was adapted from the novel of the same name by Graciliano Ramos, and likens this author to Faulkner. However, while watching Vidas Secas I felt more like it was a Portuguese-dubbed version of the The Grapes of Wrath, specifically the chapters John Ford chose not to film, as they are basically rambling incoherence on the part of Steinbeck.*
The text also praises the varying perspectives the film takes to tell the story of a poor nomadic farming family traveling through a land ravaged by drought. It specifically cites the daring of dos Santos’ to shoot the skewed thoughts of the family dog in its dying moments. I’ll concede that this scene is touching and affective (one of the few in the film), but this has little to do with this overblown directorial flourish. I’ll also note that much of the cinematography in this piece is solid “A”-level work, but is lost amongst this “D” for disjointed film.
Ebert called Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (2003) “the worst film in the history of the [Cannes Film] Festival.” He particularly disliked a shot sequence in which a lone indistinguishable motorcycle is driven toward the camera from an extreme distance, leading to a cut that displays it being driven away to the same distance. I’m pretty sure Gallo modeled this sequence from the opening and closing shots of this film.
Grade: 1 Hat Off
*My apologies to high school literature instructors who are still unexplainably teaching this as the “great American novel.”
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