Private Desert is a braid of two very different stories, and the alternating narrative focus is both a feature and a bug of this intriguing film from Brazilian writer-director Aly Muritiba.
Initially set in urban Curitiba, the story opens with Daniel (Antonio Saboia) and the dreariness of his daily life. He cares for his dementia-addled father and hustles side-gigs working security at a night club. The slow trickle of information reveals that he’s a police instructor on administrative suspension, trying to live down an unspecified but notorious scandal that involved a violent outburst against a young cadet. However, most of what we need to know about Daniel is carried in Saboia’s posture and affect, which communicate the coiled violence of an animal in a cage. It’s a magnetic performance from the first scene, on the Taxi Driver end of the De Niro spectrum, even including a scene in which Daniel interacts with himself in a full-length mirror. He’s taking a naked selfie, not brandishing a gun, but the point is made. This is a guy with a lot to prove, and one way or another he’s going to use his physicality to do it.
In the meantime, Daniel is mired in caretaking for his father, strapped for cash and feeling professionally aimless. When his sister (Cynthia Senek) reveals that she’s in a same-sex relationship, he sulks off, seeming to take the confidence as yet another of the world’s insults. The one note of grace in Daniel’s bleak existence is his connection with a mysterious woman, Sara, whom he knows only from online interactions. After he sends his own nude pic, she stops responding. It’s a measure of his desperate straits that, instead of writing her off as a flake, he doubles down on finding her in the real world. Believing her to live in a small inland city, he crosses thousands of miles on a single-minded quest to find his online lover. It’s a mission which, almost by definition, has no chance of providing him with a happy outcome.
Muritiba’s script, co-written with Henrique Dos Santos, begins taking unexpected turns once Daniel arrives in Brazil’s sweltering interior. The audience is at times one step ahead of the protagonist, which potentially saps the story of momentum while deepening the portrait of a man nearly crippled with want. Does he imagine that Sara will be a magic salve for his painful life, or does he harbor his own doubts? His police training in dealing with shifty characters doesn’t seem to register when he finds a guy (Thomas Aquino) who supposedly knows Sara and can take him to meet her. There’s an unspoken but palpable sense that Daniel is a guy trapped inside his own narrow idea of masculinity, and he’ll allow his gullibility and hope to carry him anywhere since he can surely punch his way out of whatever trouble he finds.
The trouble he encounters, however, is not the kind that can be solved with brute force. There are potential spoilers here, although the director has spoken openly of the film’s treatment of a non-binary love story that defies heteronormativity. Suffice to say that Daniel finds an unexpected connection with someone named Robson (Pedro Fasanaro), who presents as male in the conservative town but who adopts another persona in the bigger city on the other side of the river. Nearly as soon as Robson is introduced, the narrative shifts to follow this new character. The camera is just as observant and intimate with Robson as it was with Daniel, and an entirely different life unfolds in glimpses of habits and aspirations. Robson works in the local market but intends to head to a bigger city someday where different ways of living might be possible.
Luis Armando Arteaga’s cinematography, with its steady gaze in low light, unlocks intimate glimpses of these characters, especially in their private moments. When Daniel returns to the story, he’s become an outsider, and his physical menace is more pronounced since we don’t know his intentions with Robson. The bifurcated narrative is a risky move, and it has the effect of distancing the audience from Daniel’s evolving state of mind. It would be in character, but disappointing, if he resorted to violence. On the other hand, it’s almost too much wishful thinking to believe that he could open himself up to a physical relationship that defies every definition of what he thinks he knows about men and women and himself.
Ultimately, the film attempts to thread a needle in the connection between these two characters, and the degree to which it works is largely due to the committed performances from Saboia and Fasanaro, both of whom are outstanding. Despite the current Brazilian government’s virulent homophobia, the filmmakers managed to present Private Desert as the country’s official selection for the Best International Film category for this year’s Oscars. It’s the kind of recognition that would set the old Daniel to sulking, or worse, but the movie’s message suggests that even an abusive cop trapped in a prison of his own macho truculence can change his ways when love is at stake.
Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber
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