The location is Reboleira, in the suburbs of Lisbon, Portugal. In the outskirts of the Portuguese capital, a robbery goes wrong. A car crashes, the police arrest the driver, and almost two hundred thousand Euros vanish. Which of the criminal groups took the money? In O Jacaré by Basil da Cunha, the study of the criminal outbursts is of a failed act. Similar to his past works, such as 2720 and O Fim do Mundo, the Swiss-Portuguese filmmaker attempts to observe the structures of the violence. Yet, in the first seconds, we learn about one of the individuals in one of the schemes buying an alligator and putting it on a house. The intention? To scare those around and attract people to a bar. In the early frames, Cunha suggests the pathetic aspect of his sociological analysis.
In the early 2000s, in the context of the spread of world cinema, the favela movie subgenre became a success. Cidade de Deus (City of God) by Fernando Meirelles was a hit, garnering four Academy Award nominations after the snub in the foreign language category a year prior for being too violent. Still, it is one of the most popular Brazilian films in history, especially abroad. In 2007, José Padilha, a documentary filmmaker, won the Berlinale Golden Bear with Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), a portrayal of the special operations group BOPE in the Brazilian slums. Those two successful examples created multiple copies, resulting in the format exhaustion. Still, Cunha decides to collaborate with it, twenty years later. O Jacaré is a creation of a white filmmaker attempting to comment on the roots of criminal activity in Portugal. Despite the tentativeness of discussing the reality, it fuels the prejudice bloomed by the neo-nationalist Portuguese groups like CHEGA.
The Swiss-Portuguese director comments on the luxury of the crime, the gold in the teeth of those individuals, and the countless parties. But there is a despicable inhumanity in those characters; after all, they are all cruel, foolish criminals. In this sense, there lies an exploitation of true stories and profound wounds of the immigrant and black community in Portugal that spreads out as a flat image of reality. Factually, film is a mere representation of truth, a fragment that manipulates, through its tools, the true materiality of life. Still, films like the mentioned Tropa de Elite, that embodiment of image, create a parallel reality. The film, created as a portrayal of corrupt organizations, acts as a justification for the massacre of the masses in the slums. Even if people defend the unbiased element of films, arguing that they are merely stories, they have the power to provoke consequences for communities, especially minorities that are suffering the resurgence of racism and xenophobia in Europe, especially in the Iberian Peninsula.
The characters in O Jacaré are utterly ridiculous. They do not have enough characteristics to provide them with tridimensionality; in the end, they are just drug dealers. Yet, the more problematic aspect of it all is that Cunha depicts the women here as either the ones responsible for the vengeance of their husbands or reduces them to their bodies. There is a profound sexualization of the black women’s figure, which dates back to the beginning of colonization in the African continent. We learn more about the imagery of their unclothed bodies than about themselves, rather than the reasoning for the assassination of enemies due to cheating. Again, the director seems twenty years behind in his portrayal of the favelas, slums, and the marginalized community. Beneath the dialects and accents, both from the Lisbon region and the African immigration, the farce that the filmmaker wants to create is a messy, uninteresting work as a thriller, even more unworthy in its comedic tones.
Finally, Chekhov’s gun, present in the figure of the titular animal, appears in two moments: the initial and final scenes. Aas soon as we glimpse the alligator, we guess its destiny. Thus, the animal, which could be a funny, absurdist element of the criminal drama, serves solely as another aspect portraying those individuals as animal-like. They are so barbaric that they acquire wild creatures for their enjoyment. Basil da Cunha signs his name as another white filmmaker whose fascination with the favelas creates a cruel depiction of minorities. Even the farcical attempt fails, and O Jacaré is just a wasted attempt at his take on the suburbs. Unfortunately, he is twenty years too late, and it just seems like a despicable representation of the favelas, which is both a failure as a look at society and a crime thriller.
O Jacaré recently played at the Locarno Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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