Director: Daniel Bandeira
Year: 2022
No war but class war.
Daniel Bandeira‘s thriller asks necessary and uncomfortable questions about class, labour and inequality in Brazil.
We go to a dying Pernambucan farm, soon to be sold off by its owners. On the one side, a workforce of live-in staff faced with homelessness and the sudden recall of local debts, with disabling HR arrangements – their vital work documents locked in a safe? On the other, Teresa: the traumatised, white, well-to-do wife of the owner, hiding from the world as she recovers from a violent incident. The powder keg goes off, violence erupts, and as she barricades herself in an armoured car, an economic hostage situation is exchanged for a physical one, and the two sides find themselves pitted against each other in an increasingly frantic battle of wills.
Unmistakably, this is not just a Brazilian film but a northeastern film, whose setup lays out the poverty and the decline of agriculture in the region; the exploitation and disenfranchisement of poor, Black and brown citizens by people at the elitist, whiter end of the social scale; and what happens when economically desperate people reach breaking point. The beleaguered Teresa (a haunted-looking Malu Galli) nervously leaves her city condo for her family’s farm; the farm workers meanwhile may end up on the streets. Brazil did abolish slavery, later than many of its peers, but the issue of forced labour continues today, in various guises, along with plain old grinding poverty, while the privileged hide from the poor behind high walls and toughened glass. Racism remains a deep, festering wound.
At the same time Propriedade’s contained setting becomes an analogy for the gaping polarisation that’s easily visible in Brazilian society and discourse, and the rage that has erupted from its guts. Only a few years ago, the country survived an attempted far-right coup, and politics has preyed on people’s disenfranchisement and financial precarity (or worse). For non-Brazilians, look around at your own country – depending on where you are, you may spot some or a great deal of the same. Bandeira explores what he calls ‘the fear machine’ – diametrically opposed people in a zero-sum war fuelled by age-old, self-fulfilling anxieties: abuse of power by the rich, revenge by the poor.
Propriedade occupies a similar thematic space to Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s Bacurau, (though filmed prior to Bacurau, it had a later release date) but Bandeira is more focused on the story he wants to tell than a distinctive visual language. IThere’s a quiet, matter-of-fact quality to how Propriedade is filmed, making its events all the more unsettling, but as things escalate, Bandeira leans into the language of horror, letting the camera linger on sudden, shocking images. While Propriedade takes its time to find its identity, it gathers pace into a truly chilling indictment of a panicked, reactionary society and the conditions that helped create it.
