Neighboring Sounds

Kleber Mendonça Filho, co-director of Bacurau, made his first feature-length film Neighboring Sounds in 2012. It takes place in the neighborhood where he lives in Recife, a middle-class neighborhood where apartment towers are replacing single-family homes and where every entrance has a locked gate and every family has servants. The class and racial divides are shown through the ensemble cast's interactions on a single block, on which a new private security detail is setting up operations. The first chapter is called guard dogs, but the guard dog is just a noisy nuisance to the neighbors. The second chapter is called night watchman, but the building's residents are trying to figure out how to fire their night watchman who has been filmed sleeping on the job. The third chapter features the street patrol that promises peace of mind from all the car break-ins and crime in the neighborhood, but it turns out that the thief is actually the grandson of local landowner Seu Francisco who warns the patrol to leave his grandson alone. In fact, we see that this wealthy man is still the local boss--he owns a sugar plantation while his other grandson works as a real estate agent in his condos: the old power structures extend to the newly reconfigured economy.

 "The sound goes beyond what you are looking at" said Mendonça Filho in this Q and A. The mood of paranoia and fear beneath the surface of everyday life is heightened by the sound design: the barking dogs, the intrusions of music, power tools, voices--the feeling that nobody is ever really alone but also that the noise is not part of a sheltering communal life is reinforced by the way characters move from locked gate to barred door in narrow alleys and guarded domestic spaces. In one sequence, the camera looks down from an apartment window as men are jumping over the gate into the garden, and we hear the slap of their feet as they land, one after another after another. The girl in the apartment wakes up and sees them. As they keep coming, the threat seems to increase from a small group of burglars to a full-scale invasion. The sequence is revealed to be a nightmare the girl is having, but the dread contaminates waking life on the block. In another surreal sequence, the real estate agent grandson is visiting his grandfather's sugar plantation house with his girl friend. They visit a waterfall where they all stand under the cascade for a long time. Suddenly the water changes to blood and we see a flash of the grandson bathed in blood like Carrie at the prom, but he is looking straight at the camera.  His bloody family heritage returns at the very end of the film when it is revealed that the street patrol leader and his brother have a family feud with the grandfather. Seu Francisco calls them to his house for something and they tell him that they are the children of men he wronged--murdered?-- on his plantation back in 1984. The very last sequence has the family that has been tormented by the barking dog setting off firecrackers to frighten it, but the last bang is probably a gunshot from the confrontation with Seu Francisco. 

  All the watchmen are supposed to use surveillance to keep the owners safe but the owners use surveillance to spy on the night watchman's naps. Throughout the film the various maids and guardians have been present in domestic interiors, supposedly in service of their employers, but with their own agendas: the maid brings her grandchildren along, and a relative who sleeps on the couch; the security patrol leader and a different maid use an absent neighbor's home for sex, and it turns out that the house is not empty as they thought; the building watchman spies on people kissing in the elevator; another maid accidentally fries the device that has been used to torment the barking dog (the "dog buster") and is berated by her employer; the street patrol knows who is having an affair, which building the lost party-goer needs to find when he returns from a beer run. There's no privacy, only the illusion of security, and it's the heir of the sugar plantation boss who is stealing car stereos and threatening the security guards if they dare to call him on it. The last shot shows the ineffectual violence of the fiercrackers covering the gunshot off-screen; we know what it means because we have observed the ways that fears of violence permeate the neighborhood.