It
is a fundamental law of cinema that any attempt to disturb the rest of the dead
will lead to bad karma. It is also a fundamental real-life law of urban living
that real estate is scarce, so any under-utilized plots should be scooped up
and exploited. The conflict between these two laws leads to serious trouble for
an apprentice grave-digger in Juliana Rojas’s Necropolis Symphony, which screens during the new film series, Veredas: a Generation of Brazilian Filmmakers.
Thanks
to fleeting mortality, grave-digging is steady work, but poor Deodato probably
isn’t cut out for it. His elevated capacity for empathy constantly overwhelms
him at grave sites, causing him to pass out. The director hired him as a favor
to his Uncle Jaca, a longtime cemetery employee, but he is losing patience.
Fortunately for Deodato, the boss has a job requiring the full-time services of
an employee, whose day-to-day productivity won’t be missed.
Deodato
will assist Jaqueline, a hot-shot trouble-shooter from the Funerary Board, who
will be re-organizing the layout of the storied old graveyard. They need more spaces
to put bodies—bodies with funeral-paying survivors. Families behind on the
upkeep of their plots will be encouraged to move their loved ones to a drawer
in the prospective new mausoleum. Jaqueline does not want to say it in so many
words, but remains that are forgotten and abandoned will probably just end up
in a bag. Despite his hopeless schoolboy crush, this just doesn’t seem right to
Deodato. He’s not the only one who feels that way.
By
the way, Necropolis Symphony is also
a musical, with supernatural elements. In fact, many of the musical-numbers are
laugh-out loud funny for those who are somewhat familiar with Brazilian popular
song of the last twenty-years or so. For the unhip, the blend of music,
bittersweet romance, and the undead is still ridiculously charming (and the
songs are still pretty catchy). Compared to Anna and the Apocalypse, Necropolis is
much more low-key, but the two films would still make an appealing double
feature.
Eduardo
Gomes portrays Deodato as a painfully nebbish loser, but he also conveys his
sensitive soulfulness. Luciana Paes is wildly entertaining vamping it up as
Jaqueline, the leather-clad Emma Peel of funerary bureaucrats. Their chemistry
is quite engaging, while Paulo Jordao really brings the tart humor and
tunefulness as sly old Jaca. He also gives the film real heart.
Necropolis is a thoroughly appealing
film that has been woefully under-screened in the U.S. It also firmly
establishes Rojas as a budding genre auteur (Hard Labor, her first film with Marco Dutra was just okay, but
their werewolf movie, Good Manners is
terrific). This one is still her best and one of the finest representatives of
recent Brazilian supernatural cinema. Very highly recommended, Necropolis Symphony screens this Sunday
(12/8) as part of Veredas (and it
also available on the Spamflix streaming platform).
