By Jim Gilles
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 7/13/22 – Screening at Outfest on Sunday, July 17, at 3:30 PM in the Directors Guild of America Theatre 2 is Rodrigo de Oliveira’s The First Fallen (Brazil, 2021). This dramatic story of three friends in a small Brazilian town in 1983 at the time with the first wave of the AIDS epidemic takes hold in their community and they decide to form a chosen family of their own. This is Rodrigo de Oliveira’s first feature-length film but he brings it an understanding of the historical context of his characters who live in the Brazilian state of Espiritu Sancto, along the Atlantic coast just north of Rio de Janeiro. The Portuguese title “Os Primeiros Soldados” perhaps better captures the determination of the three main characters – Suzano, Humberto and Rosa – to act like “soldiers” and do something different in response to the largely misunderstood epidemic of AIDS as it arrived in Brazil in 1983. If you are interested in this film and not able to see it in the theatre, it will be available for streaming online beginning July 20, 8:00 AM with Outfest Virtual Festival: https://watch.eventive.org/outfestla2022/play/62ab9515f236470701ea7d54
The film begins with a story about a young Brazilian soldier wandering in the jungle. He is lost and starving, so he decides that he must cut off his leg and eat his own flesh in order to survive. A voice-over says that: “He thought that the first ones bear courage that nobody would ever remember. If it is not possible to survive as meat, that boy decides to survive as earth.” And we soon realize that we are watching a film-within-a-film. He continues that in his childhood memories, “My buddies couldn’t wait to go to the street and pretend to be soldiers the whole afternoon.” Suddenly the image of a lost soldier morphs into a young teenage boy covered with mud, as he emerges from the forest and he walks into the ocean to clean the mud off his body and “to wash away the taste of that loneliness so similar to mine.” After the plunge into the ocean, he comes back out of the water and the voice-over recounts that “I found out the movie didn’t end when the soldier was vomiting. There was a heroic last half hour. Everything worked out in the end. But I erased that from my memory.”
This seemingly unrelated story is being spoken aloud by Suzano (Johnny Massaro), the main character in The First Fallen. We realize that we are at the beach and that Suzano has been talking all the time, telling this story as if narrating a movie. As his nephew Muriel emerges from the waves, Muriel asks if Suzano is talking to him. Suzano’s poignant response is “Yes, but you were not supposed to be listening.” This is the first of a series of a film-within-a-film that foregrounds what will become apparent later in The First Fallen, establishing the controlling metaphor of the overall film.
This film is about the queer community in a small town of Vitória in the Brazilian state of Espiritu Sancto, along the Atlantic coast just north of Rio de Janeiro. It is New Year’s Eve of 1982 – a time when Brazilian people usually dress in white and celebrate in the summery heat of Brazilian winter. We first meet Suzano (played by Johnny Massaro), a good-looking slender 20-something man with his nephew Muriel (Alex Bonin) at the beach in Espiritu Santo, not far from the town where Muriel lives with his mother Maura (Clara Choveaux) and where Suzano grew up as a boy in the house they inherited from their parents.
Next we see this woman Maura driving home from the medical clinic where she works and stuck in a traffic jam at a bus stop, where a transsexual woman named Rosa (Renata Carvalho) is arguing with a bus passenger and furiously breaks a window on the bus as she steps down amidst insults. Having badly wounded her hand, Maura recognizes Rosa and tries to calm her down and help her stop the bleeding. After that, Maura drives to the family home, where she sees her 16-year-old son Muriel and is delighted to see her brother Suzano, who has apparently flown home to Brazil for the holiday from France, where he lives with a well-off Frenchman in Paris. What is more interesting is the tight familial bond between Suzano and his sister Maura, who understands much about Suzano’s lifestyle as a gay man.
Muriel, his nephew, seems comfortable with what he understands about Suzano, but he has not seen him in a long time and finds him rather sad. This is our first hint that something is amiss with Suzano. His sister Maura is getting ready to go to a New Year’s party with friends and is planning to take her son Muriel with her. As they dress for the party, she asks Suzano if he would like to go with her. He seems uninterested, so she suggests that perhaps he would like to go to the local gay club in town where he used to have lots of gay friends – mentioning some of the names of gay men that she knows would like to see him. He declines and Maura soon departs in her car with young Muriel for a New Year’s celebration.
Sitting in the house that was once his own place as a child, Suzano seems lost in thought and looking at old photographs – until a friend and former boyfriend named Joca (Higor Campagnaro) stops by to invite him to the gay club that night where a mutual friend, the transexual Rosa (Renata Carvalho) will be performing. Joca tries to get physical with Suzano, but Suzano pushes him away, telling Joca that he has a “husband” in Paris and that by midnight, he will be flying back to Paris first-class. Joca does not believe him. Suzano gives Joca a letter and money that he should deliver to Rosa the transexual.
Then Suzano gets in a car and begins driving into the countryside, but he seems ill and starts coughing badly. At some point, Suzano calls the house where his sister Maura and Muriel are celebrating New Year’s Eve. She tells her son Muriel that Suzano is going to the gay bar to meet some new people but Muriel seems worried about his uncle. At the same time, Suzano is driving deeper into the forest as night descends until he arrives at a wooden cottage. He goes inside and decides to sleep on the sofa inside, but only after calling Adrian, his lover, in Paris, promising to stay in touch. He also tells Adrian that he plans to go ahead with their “plan.” The idea of flying back to France was just a ruse after all. We are left to wonder what is really going on. There is clearly something really bothering Suzano.
The scene shifts to the local gay club named “Genet” painted on the wall near the entrance. Upstairs in the dressing room, the transexual Rosa is applying makeup for her midnight show at the gay club downstairs. She is busy talking about herself and we see behind her a man with a beard and a large camera. This is Humberto (Victor Camilo) and he is actually recording Rosa’s monologue as she speaks to the mirror. Humberto is a fairly quiet, self-effacing man who is apparently shooting a movie about Rosa. He will accompany her downstairs before midnight for her performance on stage before the crowd in the gay club. Rosa’s monologue is rather philosophical and reflective, hinting at how her performance will be soon on the stage. She has been offered an opportunity to perform on stage as Blanche in a local Brazilian production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and is looking over the script. Inside the script is the envelope from Suzano that apparently Joca put in it. Humberto is the cameraman who is actually making a film about Rosa but, as we come to learn, also about Suzano and himself.
An interlude shifts us magically back to Suzano who is performing a sinuous dance with a sheer red fabric. Is this the same red piece of fabric what he playfully showed to his nephew Muriel earlier? Where is he? In the forest cottage where he is staying? Is he dreaming? And whose dream? His? Or perhaps Rosa’s? Are their dreams the same? Was this the same red piece of fabric what he playfully showed to his nephew Muriel earlier and says that he won’t be performing – hinting that perhaps once he did drag shows himself.
Just before midnight, Rosa with an elaborate white gown with angel-like fabric wings attached to her arms and a fancy wig, addresses the crowd jovially, with a mixture of clever jabs at people she knows. Humberto is busy capturing it all on video. She begins to sing her song: “Warriors are people, so strong, so frail. Warriors are boys deep in their hearts. They need rest, they need to recoil. They need a sleep that makes them anew. It’s sad to see my man, my boy warrior with the weight of this time on his shoulders. I see that he screams. I see that he bleeds. The pain he has in his heart . . . And without his honor he dies, he kills himself. You can’t be happy.” This song is too depressing for the crowd and they begin to boo. Rosa quickly shifts the focus to something lighter and the midnight New Year’s countdown, but she has clearly indicated in his bleak, despairing song that there is something wrong in this gay scene that she has taken for granted for so long. Of course, Humberto has captured all this on video with his camera.
After midnight, Humberto packs up his camera and is leaving the gay club, where he suddenly encounters a young man named João, who is gay and obviously interested in Humberto and goes by the name of “Jean” in Vitória. He goes to Humberto’s place to talk to him and is curious about Humberto’s relationship with the transexual Rosa. They speak guardedly, with Humberto saying “The problem is you are from where I am.” But João wants to kiss him and that happens, although Humberto quickly establishes his distance from the younger man. New Year’s Eve ends, as the precocious Muriel asks his mother Maura about Suzano, who he feels he really doesn’t know and that Suzano seems very distant. Meanwhile in the jungle cottage far away, Suzano realizes it is midnight and goes out to see a few fireworks in the night sky.
The second part of the film begins eight months later in the same town. It is assumed that Suzano left suddenly and returned to Paris and his partner. Rosa has disappeared completely and we see a “missing person” poster on the wall in the place where Joca works. A mutual friend arrives asking about Rosa and Joca says he knows nothing about her disappearance. João, who was so interested in Humberto, cannot find him anywhere and, calling Humberto’s mother to learn more, is told to go away and never call again. All three of the main characters have disappeared.
Eventually Maura hears from her brother, who says he is calling from Paris and is fine – although eight months have clearly passed. He says he is calling from a pay phone booth and running out of tokens, but we see that he is making this up – as he is clearly not in Paris at all. We suddenly realize that he is quite ill and something serious has happened to him. He returns briefly to Vitoria and the gay club “Genet” where the usual dancing is happening but Suzano is obviously very ill and throw a packet of Polaroid photos on the floor before stumbling out of the club. The photographs tell us the rest of the story that will fill the second hour of the film and the fate of the three main characters.
The mystery behind Suzano, Rosa, and Humberto will reveal itself slowly and we will learn what they were doing in the eight months since New Year’s Eve introduced the year 1983 – the year that the AIDS epidemic became the unknown and completely misunderstood “gay disease” that began suddenly killing so many young men. The third part of the film is a story about the three “soldiers” who find their own way to survive, live, and document their experiences on video – in a set of videos that will be uncovered by Muriel, Suzano’s nephew, a few years later. What is really going on? Humberto was documenting in a very personal way the story of AIDS and the beginning of the epidemic in 1983 when it first targeted trans people and gay men in Brazil.
The film is ambitious and complex and perhaps would have benefited from a tighter storyline. but the actors are excellent and it is impossible not to be moved by the performances of Johnny Massaro as Suzano and Renata Carvalho as Rosa – the two most endearing persons we get to know. There have been plenty of films about AIDS and its impact on the lives of gay men and trans women, but this one from a remote corner of Brazil is as poignant as any. This is a film about love and resilience that sometimes can only be found in chosen queer families. And it is about remembering the courage it takes to face the challenges of a disease that was a death sentence for the millions who would die from AIDS.