Deserto Particular (Private Desert), dir. Aly Muritiba, 2021, Brazil/Portugal, 121m., in Portuguese with full English subtitles 👎
Sunday, June 26, 2022, 4:00pm Castro
+Streaming
Daniel is a cop who has been suspended from duty, without pay, and will likely face criminal charges, for a violent incident. He’s also stuck caring for his father, a senile retired police officer. Daniel responds by obsessively trying to contact Sara, a woman he has been sexting; when she doesn’t respond, he sets off in search of her, even though she lives thousands of kilometers away. (By way of distance comparison, imagine driving from San Francisco to South Dakota, mostly on back roads.) Daniel goes full stalker, putting up posters of Sara all over town and even stalking her friends.
I never felt like I had any insight into Daniel’s character. Most of his motivation stems from things that happened off-screen before the film starts (note: the violent incident is alluded to, but not shown). Mostly he just seems to be a poster boy for toxic masculinity with anger management issues, not someone whose story I have any interest in seeing. Sara is a much more nuanced character, with much better backstory, and she is much more sympathetic, especially her entirely sensible hesitance to meet Daniel in person after seeing the violent incident all over the news. But the bottom line is, if I don’t give a rat’s ass about the main character, I don’t like the movie.
Deserto Particular was Brazil’s official entry for the Best International Feature Oscar®, and friends of mine loved it, but I have to say Not Recommended.
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