This captivating love drama is a delicate dance between love and duty

The tension between one’s own heart and one’s sense of duty to one’s family has been the subject of many stories over the centuries, from classics such as William Shakespeare‘S Romeo and Juliet to, well, classics like Brad Vogel‘s and Jan Pinkava‘S Ratatouille. It is, after all, a universal feeling, that strange tug at our hearts when we are faced with the choice of following the path that has been laid out for us or making our own place in the world. When the logical conclusion of one of these alternatives is certain death, the story becomes even more gripping, because who among us can say we can resist a good tragedy? In 2001 Behind the sunit is the duty of death itself that threatens the existence and dreams of the film’s protagonist, Tonho (Rodrigo Santoro) when he meets a woman who offers him the chance for a new life. The result is grim, but still hopeful story about the need to break senseless cycles. A story that with its beautiful images, courtesy of the cameraman Walter Carvalho and the strong contrasts of the deserted Brazilian Sertão Desert is still more than worth seeing more than 20 years after its release.

Behind the sun is a true testament to the universality of stories about duty and love. The second film by Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles after his Oscar-nominated Central StationIt is based on an Albanian novel by the author Ismail Kadare. But while Broken AprilWhile the action takes place in the Eastern European country, Salles moves the story to the Brazilian northeast in the 1910s. In an impoverished and arid land where the traditional sugar-producing farmers now face competition from steam mills, two families pay blood with bloodand murdered one child after another to end a feud that had lasted since time immemorial.

Behind the sun

When his father orders him to avenge the death of his older brother, a young man questions the tradition of violence between two feuding families.

Actor

Rodrigo Santoro, José Dumont, Rita Assemany, Flávia Marco Antonio

Release date

1 May 2002

director

Walter Salles

Duration

105 minutes

Language

Portuguese

Studio

Lumiere Pictures, Mars Distribution

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What is “Behind the Sun” about?

With a screenplay by Salles, Karim AinouzAnd Sergio Machado, Behind the sun At its heart is the war that has been going on for generations between the Breves and the Ferreiras, two families whose sons kill each other without knowing why. The hatred between them runs deep, but the feud has taken on the appearance of a banal obligation, as the members of each family attend the funerals of their rivals and are granted a brief truce before their time comes. In addition, a black ribbon is passed between them, obligatorily tied to the upper arm, as a sign of whoever is coming to take their lives. In the world of Behind the sunJust like in our normal lives, death is something you just can’t escape. You are constantly threatened by it. You only have the choice between a short life full of family obligations or a long life following a path of your own choosing.

It is the latter choice that the young Pacu (Ravi Ramos Lacerda) hopes that his brother Tonho will be able to save the day after the murder of their eldest sibling Inácio (Caio JunqueiraPacu, a boy of about ten years old, is the one whose perspective serves as an introduction to the conflict between the Breves and Ferreira clans. His childish hopes are fed by a version of The little mermaid that he tells himself through the pictures of a book that he cannot read. However, his plans for his brother do not go well, because Tonho quickly reaches for the gun to kill the man who killed Inácio. But things change when Tonho meets a traveling circus performer named Clara (Flavia Marco Antonio).

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Trapped in her own duty to her godfather Salustiano (Luis Carlos Vasconcelos), a man who raised her but who also seems to be a little infatuated with her, Clara feels that her life on the streets is a prison in its own way. Or at least that’s how she starts to feel after she meets Tonho. She knows full well that his time is limited and offers him an opportunity to escapeto go with her to another place, free from Salustiano and the obligations of the Breves family. Whether Tonho will be able to bring himself to run away with Clara or whether he will die before he has the chance to experience true love, as the patriarch of Ferreira predicted, is the central tension of the story.

With Rodrigo Santoro, best known to American audiences for his role as Xerxes in 300 and Hector Escaton in WestworldTonho plays brilliantly. Behind the sun was nominated for the BAFTA and the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. It was also Brazil’s choice to represent the country at the 2002 Academy Awards. Unfortunately, the film was not nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category, now known as Best International Feature Film.

“Behind the Sun” is a film about a fate that awaits us all

For Portuguese speakers, the name of the Breves family is a nice Easter egg and a clue to what the story is about. The word comes from “breve,” which means something that happens in a short period of time. Therefore, the Breves are condemned to live “vidas breves,” or short lives, as a result of this endless struggle that no one seems to put an end to. The fate that awaits the Breves is a fate that awaits us all. After all, there is not a single person in this world who will not die at some point. But what Behind the sun What you really care about is what you do with the time you have left.

Tonho decides to live. Not in the way his father expects him to, namely that he repairs roofs, sells rapadura and works tirelessly in their small mill. No, For Tonho, it’s all about getting out of the cramped environment of his family’s farm and throws himself headlong into the world – to go to circus shows with his brother, to spend time with him and to play, and of course, to fall in love for the first time. When he runs away from home with Clara and Salustiano, it becomes the wish of both his brother and his mother that he never comes back so that he can live a full life away from all this nonsense. But unfortunately, Tonho comes back. He comes back because he knows that as long as he has that band on his arm, he cannot escape death.

Tonho’s return can be viewed in two ways. The literal interpretation, which is of utmost importance given the film’s themes, is that he returns because he still feels a duty to his family – a duty that dissolves when Clara removes the band from his arm and when an unexpected death threatens the entire dynamic between the Breves and the Ferreiras. The philosophical view of his return, however, makes us question our own futile attempts to escape the passage of time and its natural consequences. Tonho returns because, just like any of us, he cannot escape death. It is a duty we all must fulfill, no matter how we live our lives.

This duality between literal and metaphorical interpretation is also found in Behind the sun‘s images, beautifully captured by Carvalho’s keen eye. Although the images sometimes seem too intrusive, Nevertheless, they are valuable for our understanding of the main character’s dilemma. Tonho and Pacu literally have to carry loads on their farm, and a remark about how the bulls their father whips to spin the mill go about their routine uninvited does not go unnoticed. And when Tonho decides to take the road less traveled, he literally takes the road he, Pacu and their father never take, either to the next village or to the Ferreiras’ house. The sky and the sea represent freedom, and the dry dirt that sticks to the skin is, much like the fence-like sugar cane plantations, a kind of prison.

This is not particularly disturbing in a film like Behind the sun. Told from a child’s point of view, the film is in many ways a fable, a story about a doomed man who escapes death with the help of a beautiful maiden. Or maybe he manages it on his own: that’s a matter the film leaves up to interpretation. Either way, the extreme realism of Salles’ camerawork gives off a hint of fantasy – a realism that sometimes seems a little off-putting when we consider that Salles is the son of a famously rich family from the more affluent Southeast, rather than a poor man from the Northeast like his characters. It might have been better to indulge a little more in the abstract and poetic, but the film works as it is. And what it leaves us with, whether we cling to the painful death at the end or the hopeful final scene, is a sense that We need to break cycles in our lives and really enjoy it before our time comes.

Behind the sun can currently be streamed on Hoopla in the US

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