Another gem from SBS world movies, which I recorded years ago and just got around to watching. A feature film from Brazil without slums, guns, drugs, or violence, it is a rarity indeed.
Brazilian film makers seem as fixated on guns as the prepubescent boys of Hollywood.
The film offers a set of character studies, and a daring one at that for the characters neither intersect nor interact, though we keep expecting that they will since that is the film convention invoked. Instead São Paulo Stories sums it up. Along the way there is a travelogue of São Paulo, much of it from the air, Google earth, and the streets, too. It moves slowly. The director is in no hurry and establishes the place before the people.
Centro, São Paulo
Three sad, frustrated, and bereaved people make the best of it and get on with life. These are real people, not the products of the adolescent mind of a script writer. What a treat. By the end, Ênio reunites with his daughter. Pedro comes to terms with his grief. Lúcia quits her job and finds the cloud lifting.
There is one surprising almost staggering moment, and I suppose this is a spoiler of sorts. Be warned.
When Pedro and Lúcia pose for a picture against a great vista it seems they are reaching an understanding that they can help one another. Then later she discovers, by chance, that he has photoshopped her out of the picture and inserted his deceased girlfriend, and indeed perhaps the whole trip to the vista and the photograph had the purpose of getting that pose so that she, Lúcia, could be removed, or so she might well conclude. She is, to say the least, stunned, hurt, angry…. How would you liked to be photoshopped out of a picture by someone you cared about?
The opening titles and then first scenes establish the thesis. Oh, yes, there is a thesis in the film. It is that we and all around us flow through time and space, here illustrated with São Paulo’s road traffic.
” The traffic
The traffic controller, Ênio, at work
Fluid dynamics provides a model for both traffic flow, and human interaction. There is no intent and yet there is order. Chance creates meaning, I would say, contrary to the title, in Portuguese ‘Não Por Acaso’ which is literally ‘Not by Chance.’ Whether that phrase has an idiomatic meaning in Portuguese, I cannot say.
The effort of Pedro to plan ahead his pool games, and of Ênio to foresee and avert traffic jams, and Lúcia to predict the commodities market, these actions can influence events, they can divert the flow, but they cannot change the fundamental dynamic. The sequence when Pedro realises his plan for the pool game is wonderfully rendered. It is the payoff of earlier preparations both by Pedro and the film maker.
Philippe Barcinski
This film is Philippe Barcinski’s first feature length movie and yet is assured and controlled as if by an old pro.
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