Neville de Almeida's directorial debut is such a curious and highly politically charged film that one wonders why his career turned to a different
directions where he explores social conventions, contradictions and throwing lots of sex scenes in his works. I'm not complaining about the later part
but one must consider that most of the time the scenes of sexual nature end up being more important than the message of deconstructing society and its
false moralisms. But here's an important, obscure and almost forgotten film from the marginal cinema that almost never got to see the light of day after
being censored at the time of its release due to its presentation of tortures and political themes considered forbidden by the then 1960's military regime.
"The Garden of War" stars Joel Barcellos as Edson, a clueless and apolitical young man who becomes fascinated by a young female filmmaker and he
wants to appear in her next film, a social/political manifesto. Thanks to some connection with other people in the world of arts, he gets approached by a mysterious man (Paulo Villaça)
who hires the man to an important mission where he must deliver a suitcase to someone on a ship. A couple of good bucks is good enough for the man who
doesn't know what's in the suitcase, but when he's arrested by an obscure right-wing organization he is forced to confess to whom the bag was to be delivered
and if he was part of any particular political group.
Discussing notions and strategies from capitalism, socialism, comunism and imperialism and also racial equality, as demonstrated by the monologue
delivered by a lonely Antônio Pitanga at a party, the movie covers the same basics of many world New Wave films of the 1960's with its series of tableux
revolving around thoughts and feelings that later culminate in the countless beatings and tortures suffered by Edson. With those issues and sequences -
even though never making a direct attack on the military - it's obviously that the movie would suffer on the hands of the people in charge of the country.
And it's such a daring work that was completed before the AI-5 come along - the law that took civil liberties and censored the arts considered subservive.
Neville was merely recreating what was heard from survivors of the prisons and making his speech in favor of freedom of all sorts, specially the freedom of
expression of which this film failed to survive at the time, getting a late release many decades later.
It's an interesting experience for those who want to know more about that period in time, it covers in great precision the feelings of a generation
and how they expressed themselves through art. It's a little confusing at parts but it never gets lost. The distracting problems comes at the beatings faced
by the hero due to poor staging, poor choreography and it becomes quite innefective for two reasons: it looks fake and how on earth he somewhat "accepts" what
comes to him without a little fight back? He's not wearing handcuffs in some of those sequences and sometimes it's just an one-on-one case, just one guy against
him? On another scene he manages to push some guys, but bear in mind that whatever organization with the purpose of extracting information through pain and torture
would never leave a man without handcuffs.
For the little I've seen from the director, this is his best film but it's not the most memorable. Major audiences go for the weak and raunchy "Rio Babilônia" or
the outrageous "Os Sete Gatinhos" and its unforgettable lines and moments. But this one has a great deal of artistic presence, a message to be shared and a
great sense of direction of which his later films somewhat didn't had all that much, even though he always managed to bring out the best from his actors. I
was blown away with this movie and I strongly suggest its viewing. 9/10.
