Review - Entranced Earth (1967)

This surreal, sweltering vision of subtropical political purgatory from Glauber Rocha is the most direct work in the Brazilian filmmaker's ecstatic oeuvre. He trades the blasted historical hinterlands of his 1963 breakthrough 'Black God, White Devil' for the fictional coastal republic of Eldorado (a thinly disguised Rio de Janeiro), where idealistic poet Paulo (Jardel Filho) is gripped by dual crises. He can't decide whether he'd better serve the revolutionary cause as an artist or a journalist, and is torn between loyalty to two antithetical candidates seeking power: the vainglorious right-wing Diaz (Paulo Autran), a former mentor backed by foreign interests, and populist upstart Vieira (José Lewgoy), sympathetic to the will of the people but equally susceptible to corruption, or worse, impotence. Entangled in intrigue and finding no simple route to change, he opts for armed resistance, the only recourse left to the artist, or so the director appears to suggest. Spun through Rocha's delirious, dissonant prism, his homeland is more a morally bankrupt Sodom than a golden utopia. As if symptomatic of a pathological hypocrisy that he wishes to expose, practically every image and sound presented seems at odds with its complement; introspective shots of solitary figures in nature are juxtaposed with hysterical crowd scenes, realistic locations give way to gothic set pieces, classical music cues are intercut with machine-gun fire, elegant poetry is laid over frenzied montage. Rocha's indictment of the political morass at home is so relentless and wide-ranging, it's no wonder it was banned by the Brazilian government upon release, and that just a few short years later he'd be directing his incendiary films in exile.