Brazilian film maker Kleber Mendonça Filho filmed Neighboring Sounds (2012) on a street in Setúbal, a nouveau-riche area where he grew up in Recife. It is a fascinating look at modern Brazilian society in regards to race, paranoia about security and violence, land rights, and relations.
More than half the street's buildings are owned by patriarch Francisco Oliveira (W. J. Solha), who got rich running a sugar mill in Bonito. Flashbacks of the plantation open the film. Don Francisco’s foreign-educated nephew João (Gustavo Jahn) is a bored realtor who shares center stage with also-bored housewife Beatriz ‘Bia’ Linhares (Maeve Jinkings). Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) shows up with buddies to offer private night security for the neighborhood, but have a secret motive revealed in the film's penultimate scene with Francisco, Clodoaldo, and his brother (SPOILER ALERT !). Apparently in 1984, Francisco snuffed out the boys' father on the sugar plantation, and the brothers return the favor. This act of revenge slowly builds over two hours of the film. Sight & Sound 's Tony Rayns comments "It’s quite a daring stratagem to spring such a narrative surprise in a film’s closing moments."
The director (in a voice over) mentions his distaste for close-ups so typical of spaghetti westerns. Yet the parallels of this film and Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) are uncanny. Both films are based on contested land rights (water for steam trains contingent on construction of a train station and large sugar plantations). Both films involve a long delayed revenge involving brothers, revealed in both films in the penultimate scene. And Solha looks so much like Jason Robards !
