Felipe Cataldo / Brazil / 1h11
Synopsis
"Benjamim Zambraia is a young drunk who wanders around the city and is sometimes treated with pampering and sometimes with a beating by his parents. As in Chico’s book, the boy is obsessed with a big stone."
Our opinion about this flick has quite evolved. Some of us loved it right away, others almost cried foul. A second viewing got everyone to agree. Hereunder we report on our experience; maybe you shouldn’t read the second part of this article if you envisage getting into this Selfpanoptic and don’t want to be influenced by our scraps of interpretation so you may draw your own conclusions.
First viewing
Cataldo establishes his style, which is laudable. There’s a real hypnotic process, as if we should dive into a dream or a nightmare. The feature film switches between oneiric sequences and scenes more traditional on paper but often zany in their execution. Let’s be honest: the movie is not accessible, especially not in its quite long and abstruse beginning. Until the emergence of a more tangible narration, a few devices hold the audience’s interest. Here are two leitmotifs, kinda poetic: one textual (voice-over « The images bouncing at the bulge of his skull »), the other one visual (a miniature camera hung by a thread shows up in certain shots, so unreal that you’ll sometimes wonder if it’s an insertion or a physically present installation— this is funny and suitable).
We immediately liked the dialogues’ technique: a scene is shot, then foleys are recreated and the voices roughly dubbed without synch… or replaced with other eloquent sounds! For the meaning as for the phantasmagorical aesthetics, it works. Pretty researches too, about similarities between film grain & real textures, water & 16-35mm roll, abstract/concrete games…
Even if the viewer isn’t supposed to know it, the director’s central presence on screen (role of the eponym character) can disconcert: an ego trip behind all this? Some ideas relate to cinema indeed… Sometimes the voice-over feels gratuitous, when no evident signification comes to mind. And cyclic reuse of certain pictures supports this impression.
The interminable end credits can leave some of you cold: if some parts made sense and the global object looked nice, what was the speech’s purpose on balance?
Second viewing
Strangely, once you’ve acquainted yourself with this first experience, a common thread appears from one scene to the next one, and links several other distant sequences— then we acquire certainty that all this has not been set randomly. A reasoning was built. The text turns out to be far from optional, because several answers hide behind one simple sentence, that a state of contemplation or incredulity may make us miss at first glance. Let’s notice that the script refers to Chico Buarque’s book « Benjamim », which surely leads to quite a few elusive references for the viewer who hasn’t read it. By the way we’d be very curious to know what film’s sentences quote the book and which ones are poems written by the director.
To fully appreciate « Benjamim Zambraia and the Selfpanoptic », actually you should keep in mind its genesis: Felipe Cataldo made his film from 2013 to 2020 by collecting various rushes’ negatives and old audio tapes. He had the time to choose what to shoot. The approach becomes clearer, and the director’s protagonist embodiment logical. So does the Old Man’s late appearance, whereas we were first thinking this allegorical figure should’ve been inserted earlier. The « rewind » thing in the middle of the movie, and therefore following parallels, can now be understood, whilst we took them for simple playful experiments. However, we still don’t get… damn, why is/are cat(s) so obsessed with this poor multi-socket adaptor?!
Except this last detail, we've come to an analysis that, if is not “the” good one, explains everything and makes us entirely enjoy the film. While people seek oblivion or self-and-others discovery, nay try to satisfy an insatiable curiosity of the world, within drugs, religion or spiritualities (hence these concurrent evocations), the director with this film seems to wonder about Cinema’s ability to be part of metaphysical quest.
Conclusion
Hard to stop there as we’d be keen on dissecting each reference, giving one hypothesis per element… And on the other hand, not knowing is good too! If you’re looking for a film that resembles nothing that you’ve ever seen, and to dive into it to find some distraction, technical experimentation or symbols with various possible meanings, Benjamim Z. is your man.
O.N-P.
« Benjamim Zambraia e o Autopanóptico » joins official selection for the Little Croco Festival’s first edition, nominated in the Experimental category.
Trailer:
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