GOOD MANNERS, tale of the full moon – Review

Racking up the awards in various film festivals in the four corners of the world, GOOD MANNERS has fuelled our curiosity. Have to say that this is not every day that one sees a tale of the fantastic brazilian.

The genre of the fantastic reveals all its interest, as it allows you to create relationships between the characters, who are not looking to match the horns with models imposed by reality. The fantastic can of course mention to everyone a type of relationship with which he is familiar, but by highlighting the human by the inhuman and the superhuman, the genre seeks ultimately to make their own way to the emotions, beyond the conventions and the tangible boundaries of the present-day world. By signing THE GOOD MANNERS, the duo of filmmakers Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas offers a story of love outside the norm, the ability to deploy its range of emotions, in a spectrum beginning with subtle touches of strangeness to finally gain depth in empathy.

Built in two parties identifiable by the ellipse of seven years, which delimits, the film of Dutra and Rojas tells, or rather tale, the relations in which Clara, a young nurse, is invested so that the extraordinary situation in rebuterait more than one. In the first part, Clara accompanies the pregnancy of Ana ; in the second, it elevates the child loup-garou, in which the rich heiress gave birth. If fangs, claws, and exacerbation of hair there, these elements genrifiques serve, above all, a magnificent love that exchange of incarnation (that of Ana becomes one of Joel) and ratio of strength, but that survives yet in the metamorphoses.At the time Guillermo Del Toro looks at the Oscars posed on its chimney, Dutra and Rojas we also propose an approach to the fantastic by way of the tale. If GOOD MANNERS takes place in a social context that is not totally devoid of plausibility, and appears to be rooted in a time, the part of the tale comes to dressing up the story as if the authors were depositing the layer of patina on the wonderful over the paint layer gross of the social context. The tale does not only the film in a formal manner by a set of archetypes and of the typical patterns, it also plays on the aesthetic level and is reflected to the image a certain artificiality voluntary. As well in images of the city seen through the windows of the apartment of Ana, reminiscent of the matte paintings of the past, we can see a descent film from the illustration of book of fairy tales.

Who says “fairytale” assumes monster, ogre, or at least extraordinary creature, and one wonders in the first half-hour of what a character will bring the process display up to the story. We think, first, that the strangeness will come from Clara, came from a poor neighborhood to settle in the everyday life of a rich woman; you can imagine that the disorder is born of the interpenetration of the two social classes. However, it is a false trail, and this is not Clara’s intruding in an established order of reality, it will be in reality the spectator a ringside seat to attend to this intrusion, at least in the first part of the film. Because, if it is necessary to underline a problem in the story that is told, it is its length which gives the impression of attending two films glued end-to-end : Clara and Ana, followed by Clara and Joel with virtually two different points of view. In regards to the history of Joel, the events that constitute the body of the story in a film with the classic structure, arrive here from one hour and forty-five minutes, with the risk that the viewer’s mind still in full digestion of the first part, not the most receptive to these events, at this time there.We will excuse this timing issue, as it is the result of the party took precisely the bearer of the poetry of GOOD MANNERS. This shift towards the fantastic in the mild, by a slow pace and with an atmosphere that is almost “’cooconing” in the first part, makes the contrast with the outpouring horror of the scene of the birth, all the more impactful. The differences of temperament of the grounds on the screen, between the intimate drama and the figure of the werewolf, do not create a baroque treatment, as some films crossovers using often of derision, or even potacherie, in order to pass the improbability of the alloy. Here, the narrative takes enough time to install, weaving a silk emotional that allows us to understand this universe and the aesthetic form that contains it.

Beyond a simple exercise formalist, THE GOOD MANNERS we gather by the assurance with which she imposed her poetry, namely, in the expression of a beauty that is bold, uninhibited by the argument fantastic. The musical dimension of the film has a lot to do, providing us with moments in which the grace and the disorder become intertwined, as in an ode to the night, where a clocharde sings a warning to Clara about the fate towards which it is directed. Here we find the place of the chorus in ancient tragedies, which reminds us of the song as secular art, echoing the genre of the fairy tale, which he also passed on orally for thousands of years. Well that apartment at the time of smartphones and considerations of a vegan, the trajectory of Clara is part of a story that began at the dawn of time.

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