If recent critical darlings “Neon Bull” and “Aquarius” are something to go by, Brazilian cinema is poised to break out in a major way. Film festival programmers the world over are surely scouring markets for the next big thing from the South American country, with Sundance hedging their bets on “Don’t Swallow My Heart, Alligator Girl!,” the feature-length directorial debut for filmmaker Felipe Bragança. Selected for the festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition, the intriguingly titled film delivers the kind of regionally-inflected scenario that one comes to expect of Brazil’s cinematic output. However, Bragança’s ambitions exceed his reach, and ‘Don’t Swallow My Heart’ fails to reconcile its various story strands, conflicting tones and genre aspirations.
‘Don’t Swallow My Heart’ transposes (at least in part) the star-crossed lovers narrative of “Romeo and Juliet” to the border between Brazil and Paraguay. The film’s opening titles lay out the history of the region for festival audiences that are likely to be unaware: this frontier has been contested territory between the two countries since the Paraguayan War of 1864-1870. As is the case with so many nations, the trauma of colonialism runs deep and continues to be felt in modern times. In the contemporary setting of Bragança’s film, this tension is replayed as a violent conflict between two biker gangs: on the Brazilian side, the Calendar Gang, whereas indigenous Paraguayans have formed the rival Guarani Republic.
This turf war is a backdrop for the A-plot referenced in the title of ‘Don’t Swallow My Heart,’ in which 13-year-old Brazilian boy Joca (Eduardo Macedo) pursues an enigmatic Paraguayan girl, Basano (Adeli Benitez) in spite of the cultural gulf that separates them. Their initial interactions hint at a film more invested in mysticism; when Joca catches up to Basano in a field, the sun beaming, she presses her hand to his chest as his heartbeat overwhelms the ambient noises on the soundtrack. This metaphysical act of stealing the boy’s heart drives much of the conflict in the ensuing runtime, and while it’s matched by other confounding events (most memorably a historical sword drawn near the banks of the Apa River), Bragança chooses to instead pile on additional narrative registers, namely the family drama involving Joca and his brother, Fernando (Cauã Reymond), who is also involved in the ’80s-inflected drag races that take place after nightfall.
For large passages of the film, particularly in its latter half, Fernando (or December, as he is known in the gang) takes over as the central character, grieving at the death of his mentor and placing the blame entirely onto the rival indigenous gang. He also seems to be suffering from daddy issues — the boys live with their mother — although the psychology of all this is murky at best. The performances in ‘Don’t Swallow My Heart’ aren’t poor per se, but the continual shifting of the characters from stock types or emblematic (Fernando behaves like someone from a S.E. Hinton novel) to flesh-and-blood and back again is a tall order for non-professional actors and a relatively inexperienced filmmaker.
It is unclear if ‘Don’t Swallow My Heart’ is attempting to make any kind of statement about the contentious relations along the Brazilian-Paraguay border, at least anything more substantial than the inference that history is doomed to repeat itself. It is far more likely that Bragança saw the border setting as an inherently cinematic one, an impulse most overstated by the title of the film’s fourth chapter, “The Escape of the Coward Cowboy.” This tip of the hat to the American Western also speaks to a self-conscious narrative structure that is more Quentin Tarantino than great literature. Similar accusations could be levelled at the cheap disco balls that add neon flavor to the meetings of the Calendar Gang, or the pulsating synth score that exclusively accompanies the nighttime segments of the film. Even the bikers’ outfits are overly ornate and conjure memories of “Mad Max,” although a small part of this reviewer holds out hope that Bragança is actually a huge fan of “Turbo Kid” and is instead pointing to that Canuck cult flick.
The further ‘Don’t Swallow My Heart’ strays from the concrete, immediate reality of Joca and Basano’s daily lives and moves into overly-familiar movie images and soundscapes (or its other plot lines), interest begins to dissipate. Even on the level of action, the nighttime sequences are shot in a way that fails to manifest the thrilling genre legacy that Bragança seems so intent to draw from. Surely some intricacies are lost in translation, but despite its catchy title, ‘Don’t Swallow My Heart’ amounts to little more than unfulfilled potential, arthouse posturing and shallow homage. Another film, then, will have to pick up the sword for Brazilian cinema. [C]
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