Review for Antonio Das Mortes

Whilst never as acclaimed as its predecessor Due e o Diablo na Terra do Sol (1964) director Glauber Rocha's sequel Antonio Das Mortes is a key film in the Cinema Novo movement and another of the director's fierce polemics against Brazil's oppressive military state. The story concerns a haunted bounty killer (broad, bearded and donning a shocking pink scarf) whose assignment to murder the deranged Christ-like revolutionary Corina (in order to remove his rural proletarian followers and make way for the industrialization of their homesteads) is clouded by his gradual association with those he must kill. With its bloody shootouts and elongated pantomime death sequences (with one character taking half the film to finally expire) the film indulges in the kind of operatic western violence made famous by Leone and his Spaghettis.

Couple this with the Novo style of shooting in real, poverty stricken locations using non-professional actors and roving handheld cameras and Rocha's anachronisms becomes oddly beguiling. As Brazil's carnival spills out into the ghetto and the killer wades through a sea of moving bodies the film mixes its gaudy energy with a verite immediacy (that at times comes across like one of Werner Herzog's deranged South American travelogues). Maddening soliloquies and scenes of murder and burial play for far too long but when overlaid with the rhythmic singing and pounding drums of Corina's followers it instils a hallucinatory tone to Antonio's quest. Indeed mysticism is embraced and by seeming to absorb the soul of the murdered revolutionary in a bizarre caress, Antonio transforms from wicked dragon to saint warrior. And as he violently turns on his colonizer employers Rocha's true agenda becomes clear - this isn't an entertainment, it's a call to arms.