From Brazil comes this uncompromising, challenging and disturbing parable about exploitation and inhumanity in a bucolic rural setting (somewhere between Recife and hell). Directed by Cláudio Assis, ''Baixio das bestas'' (''Bog Of Beasts'') is an orgy of incest, rape and all possible forms of abuse. It is not quite clear whether the film is supposed to denounce a specific reality of Lula's socialist Brazil, or a more generic ''capitalist'' reality of Latin America, but either way, the parallels in exploitation of the prostitutes with that of local sugar-cane workers, are unmistakable. Drunken, violent predators dominate the film, but curiously, they are never identified with the upper classes. As one critic
has written, "positive aspects of modern Brazil are thin on ground (...) Explicitly post-industrial: events unfold in shadow of abandoned sugar-mill. Film-makers' attitude to characters and their behaviour is somewhat ambiguous (...) Nocturnal cesspool-digging. Debauchery. A field on fire becomes a vision of hell. Drunken nihilism in control. Human relations are based on exploitation and insult, though the atmosphere is surprisingly party-like". This is the kind of movie where a brutal murder of a crippled old man is probably the most optimistic and morally uplifting scene, in large part because the old man in question is a soul-less monster who beats and sexually abuses his own daughter/granddaughter (incest) and regularly takes her to a gas station to show her naked to paying (and masturbating) customers.
