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While watching Aluisio Abranches's The Three Marias, I half-expected to see a Clint Eastwood-shaped tumbleweed roll by. The Brazilian film plays like a stepsibling to El Topo and is one of those foreign language films in which you hope something was lost in the translation of subtitles because everything seems more than a little bit off. Then again, I'm sure Brazilians say the same thing when David Lynch films are translated into Portuguese and shipped to their country. Then again, a mistranslation of a Lynch film might actually help it to make sense.
Anyway, Marias is set in Northeastern Brazil and opens with a tremendous shot of a man and a woman arguing under a giant rock. You can't hear them, on account of the camera being placed very far away and also the extremely loud score. The film then rockets us forward a few decades while showing the grisly deaths of three men we later learn to the husband and sons of the woman in the first shot. Her name is Filomena Capadócio (Marieta Severo), and it turns out the guy she was arguing with was old boyfriend Firmino Santos Guerra (Carlos Vereza), who apparently carries one hell of a grudge as he's the one who ordered the hits on her family. There are more ties between the two characters, but I won't get into that, for spoilers' sake.
Instead of getting sad, Filomena decides to get even and calls her three daughters (all named Maria - hence the title) into town for the funerals. "I want pain, not a flood," she demands, forbidding the appearance of tears at the burial. Then she sends each daughter on a mission to find and hire a particular killer to do away with Santos Guerra and his two sons. It's a revenge tale with a moral twist - a bloody Brazilian fable in which we all learn a little something about fate and irony.
With sporadic flashes of disturbing brilliance early in the film, particularly the murder scenes, I expected more from Marias' later acts, but they're basically just choppy and rhythmless. The daughters' journeys involve finding very unusual men (one calls himself the Devil's Horse, and another eats snakes and refuses to speak to women ever since he heard the story of Adam and Eve), but somehow Abranches isn't able to turn the wackiness into anything I would be able to recommend to anyone who isn't whacked out of their gourd on mind-altering substances. Marias might play well as a midnight festival film, but beyond that, I'm not sure where the picture's audience can be found.
1:28 - Not Rated
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