The Priest and the Girl
Released 1965, directed by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade
A man comes to town, in this case a priest – or we might as well call him The Priest (Paulo José) since we never learn his name. The town is also nameless, a few stucco buildings decaying artfully amidst rocky hills. De Andrade was a leading member of Brazil’s Cinema Novo, and one of that movement’s primary tenets was the need for increased cinematic representation for the poor, the oppressed, the forgotten; here he provides said representation with a barbed, stoned-faced enthusiasm that will be familiar to viewers of Buñuel’s Land Without Bread.
This nameless town, the remnant of a mining boom long bust, is set up something like pre-revolutionary France with its three Estates. Standing in for both the King and his nobles is Fortunato (Mario Lago), an old man who runs the local store and bar, and who acts as the buyer for whatever meager stones can still be found nearby; for the Church we have The Priest; and for the peasantry we have a collection of wiry old men and women, stoic and blank in their poverty (adding to whatever unease we may have regarding this portrayal is the fact that these peasants were played by non-actors, whom de Andrade recruited from the rural hamlet where the movie was filmed). There is even a member of the nascent bourgeoisie on hand, Vitorino (Fauzi Arap) the local pharmacist, although as a bourgeois he leaves something to be desired, being all nerve and useless sensibility. He might be better thought of as the film’s aesthetic conscience.
Since the town has nothing much in the way of material goods to spark conflict, these characters instead clash over possession of Mariana (Helena Ignez), a young woman left in Fortunato’s care as a child - although he has never it seems felt very fatherly towards her. De Andrade is careful to show no youth on screen aside from Mariana; while Fortunato has a straightforward sexual motive for desiring her, the other characters are more abstractly covetous. She’s innocence, health, the future. Not particularly a person in the town’s collective eyes, she is a treasure to be kept.
At the time of filming Brazil had just undergone a military coup; de Andrade was profoundly opposed, and The Priest and the Girl can be read as pro-stasis, or perhaps rather as a portrait of the pain, the complexity and pitfalls, of change when it comes. As the film begins the town’s original priest lies dying; our Priest enters as a stranger, come to give last rights. This old priest, whom we never even see, apparently kept Fortunato from carrying out his plan to marry Mariana; yet never acted decisively to end his exploitation of her. With his death, there is a sense that change is finally possible – Fortunato hopes to force the marriage, Vitorino hopes that Mariana can be saved. What does Mariana hope for? We will find out shortly.
Cinema Novo was similar to other filmic movements of the era – the goal was to make it new, to discard old influences and find fresh and surprising sources – but it was also unusually inward-looking. Whereas the French for example were keen to evangelize for their Vague Nouvelle, Cinema Novo was a reaction to the already established failure of Brazilian cinema to find an audience outside Brazil, and a rejection of an export-oriented big-budget style of moviemaking. By making their films smaller, the auteurs of the new cinema would live within the means provided by a purely local public; and freed from the need to appeal to a mass audience, they would liberally pursue both self-expression and a granular examination of various parochial concerns. A key text was Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto Antropófago, with its cannibalistic conception of cultural reverse-imperialism; and while this is making too free with the metaphor, it is at least tempting to posit that a movement inspired by consumption and ingestion will be less glorifying of dissemination.
What this all means is that for an American watching The Priest and the Girl in 2018 there is a sense of having to work at decoding beyond the degree of decoding routinely required; and while other Cinema Novo films present an overload of signals to be interpreted – see for example de Andrade’s own Macunaíma – in this instance the challenge is to detect meaning in austerity, to look at a blank piece of paper and discover the secret message.
This is most apparent in the characters of The Priest and Mariana, both ciphers. The Priest is weak and closed off; his signature move is to childishly turn his back on interlocutors who distress him – leading to a few wanly comic scenes of him being pursued in and out of various corners. When not being thus pursued he likes to go on long scenic walks, posing moodily against the horizon. The Priest and the Girl came out the year after Notes on Camp; it is not campy – in many ways it is inertly classical (it’s based on a poem) – but in these scenes we can hear camp maybe knocking on the door.
Mariana, at first passive, is somehow brought to life by The Priest’s underdeveloped sexuality. The why of this is mysterious, and meant to be so – de Andrade wanted to preclude any examination of her inner life, and so she is, for us, all surface. But she passionately declares her love to The Priest, an occasion for much back-turning. While rebuffing her advances, he still desires to save her, from Fortunato, from the town – they flee in the dead of night. It will all of course end badly, but the way in which it ends is admirably perverse – suffice to say they don’t get far – and the eventual moral activation of the peasantry is surprisingly horrific.
This is a difficult film to write about, flat and cold on the surface, shifty underneath, funnier perhaps than it seems, or perhaps so deadly serious as to take offense at laughter. While the action is muted – certainly not farcical – it is hard to think of a single act committed by any of the characters which can be described as wise or sensible; Vitorino, our Jiminy Cricket, is reduced at the end to mumbled philosophizing on the beauty of Mariana and The Priests’s brief tryst (The Priest succumbs in a tastefully shot scene that ends with him face down in the dirt), while those poor oppressed peasants prepare to murder the erstwhile lovers. There is plenty of contempt to go around, and what energy exists is in tension with itself. It might be best described as the distillation of national crisis into a psychological-spiritual objective correlative of depression. Three-and-a-half stars.
