Retro Review by Nazeeh Alghazawneh
No one wants to believe that they live next to an overwhelming evil. Conflicts with your neighbor are a universally accepted struggle, but only up to a certain threshold of deplorability. In O Vigilante, a feeling of evil is palatable among the population of a proverbial village, but spectators merely watch from the sidelines under the excuse of merely minding their own business. This coping method of burying your head in the sand in the wake of extremely vile behavior is only further exacerbated by the crushing socio-economic conditions that leave a community with no recourse in the event that they wanted to do something about it. How far must a community be collectively pushed before they can no longer ignore repeated casual atrocities occurring right outside the place they lay their heads?
O Vigilante (1992) or, The Vigilante, was the final feature released by Brazil’s provocative Ozuldo Ribeiro Candeias. It features an unemployed man who begins a security position as a night watchman in a Brazilian village wrought with abject poverty. The watchman boasts a reputation of being a top marksman, evidenced by a couple of trophies he apparently won in shooting competitions. As the watchman spends more time in the village, he reluctantly gains a nemesis, a local brute who cannot stop laughing in the ugliest way. The thug is a terror to the citizens of the village, taking anything and anyone he desires, by gleeful force. The dynamics of the major players are set up with a clear trajectory of an inevitable confrontation, much in the spirit and ethos of a western. These socio-economic realities of the village are primarily displayed in the film’s imagery, which see-saws from banal everyday life to harrowing sexual violence. Much of the village reacts to the violence in speculative horror, but not in any actionable way; observation is taking place but not much is said or discussed.
Candeias was among the leading pioneers of Brazil’s Cinema Novo (“New Cinema”) movement, specifically during the movement’s third phase, the Cinema Marginal (1968-’72); this third movement during Cinema Novo is also referred to as Udigrudi, or Brazilian for “Underground.” Cinemo Novo was a response to the social, political and racial turmoil occurring in Brazil that attempted to create a brand of cinema in the vein of Italian neorealism that depicted the incredibly harsh realities of its citizens. This movement was born in direct in opposition to the traditional Brazilian cinema of musicals and comedies that were sourced from mainstream Hollywood epics. The Cinema Marginal, specifically, placed an emphasis on transgressive provocation to its audience in the form of “garbage aesthetics” that featured dirty, unpolished filmmaking, an exact replication of their marginalized place in society.
The poster for O Vigilante is among one of the most striking posters I’ve seen due to its direct simplicity. All you can see is the barrel of a handgun, the person holding it obscured and out of focus. The positioning of the barrel – very close to the camera, seemingly at eye-level – is not unintentional. The poster summons this profound quote from Candeias himself:
“Many people think that one should not show the misery in a beautiful country like Brazil, but only to show places and pretty people because showing poverty is something subversive. So many times I was called subversive.”
There is nothing subversive going on in Candeias’s cinema; by design, all of the misery of the film happens as close to your face as possible.