Carnival Is Over

What's in a name? A rose by any other would smell as sweet, but Carnival Is Over gets something extra from the original. Os Enforcados, a plural, and drawn from several places. Quartered in more, for the term finds its home in the magisterial and the magical. The Tarot has it as the 12th of its major arcana, a knave and not a knight. The hanged man, and so in plural the hanged.

Not men, carefully. A couple, more. Those names that are said and unsaid include the Scottish play. I leave its name out not from superstition but because it is as misleading as it is illuminating. Like the card its reversals allow new interpretations.

Pepe Rapazote is Valerio, a name that means "strong". Leandra Leal is Regina, she that rules. They launder money from the animal game through the family firm Mendes. That's from "son of Menendo", a "whole sacrifice". Who washes the money? Batista, from baptist. Where is it spent? Among other places the samba school of Unidos de Pavona. The united of a part of North Rio de Janeiro, from a native tongue, "the Dark Place". That is perhaps a lot of reading into, but the film invites it, welcomes it, ushers it to waiting seats to gaze through and at something arch.

There is a dissonant brass part to the soundtrack in places, one whose disquiet means that tracks like The Banquet and The Knife And The Rope unify Thiago Franca's score and Fernando Coimbra's writing and direction to compelling effect. In the sun-bleached environments we are often given what one might call bright noir. There's a darkness, but oh! What contrasts. They start with white text on a black background. There's an uncertainty that comes with prose as prologue, but when it works as it does here it is quickly lifted. So packed with incident and insight and incitement is the film that the efficiencies of a couple of paragraphs are well weighted.

So too any number of shots, slow zooms, the repetition of elements, kitchens that become stages, elements that ring metallic like cymbals, symbols as obvious as crowns and stairs, knives and apples. Inviting us with creeping camera, tempting us with reflection, and in and among the gravity a levity too. It's a little over two hours but it has more happening than works twice its length. It is lean in both its efficiency and its skies. Footprints and falling, flooding and folly. Other games, other appetites.

There's a carnival king, grotesque, smashed. An outsized queen from a chess-set, inverted. That recurring apple. That repeated knife. Inheritance and retribution are close cousins often enough, but one cannot spell "revenge" without "gene". We've had tales of families and complex criminality and Carnival Is Over pokes a nose into Chinatown, asks The Godfather about its business, and insists like Sexy Beast.

Immediately it grabs. I have mentioned several other works and there are games afoot throughout. Some of those are names, bribery has many euphemisms and the corrupt are variously addressed on their brown envelopes. That playfulness and that awareness are part of solid poise. What the film plants bears fearsome fruit.

Coimbra's touch is assured, Ulisses Malta Jr's cinematography helps create something that looks as crisp as shadows on clean concrete. Colour that's everywhere highlights that darkness. Not neon, not neo-, this noir is distinctly old-fashioned. It is less of the giallo than the gallow, those hanged again. One would say tragically so, but that's about masks, not misery.

Valerio comes back to troubled inheritance, his father dead, his uncle now in charge. Rio is a great city, not a hamlet. That play's the thing, but footnotes are not the only place where one might see a dagger before thee. Carnival Is Over wears its thefts proudly, glad to be caught red-handed. It is stronger for them, a dark delight.