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| From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3_6fZrSHru0/UciCfn5WeBI/AAAAAAAAWME /SyaWZ0VGDdU/s1600/THE-END-OF-MAN.jpg |
Dir. Jose Mojica Marins
Revisiting the films of Jose Mojica Marins, the creator of the
Coffin Joe character, the attempts at philosophy and meaning within them, while
completed confused at times, is one of the most interesting aspects of them as
poverty budget experiments in lurid genre. His famous alter-ego Coffin Joe is a
Nietzschean superman, an atheist who believes in the power of reproduction and offspring
only. He blasphemes and mocks the superstitions of others, and while he loses, it's
never directly considered to be divine intervention, always hazy of whether its
real or hallucinations of the character's mind. Out of the films I can get hold
of by Marins though, the films
outside his famous two, At Midnight I'll
Take Your Soul (1963) and This Night
I'll Possess Your Corpse (1967), are even more complicated and interesting
in how attempts at ideas against the limitations Marins had making the films lead to the results onscreen. The Strange Hostel of Naked Pleasures
(1976), for example, is upfront in being a tale of the afterlife, an area
Coffin Joe the character dismissed as delusions. And then there's this film, The End of Man.
A man, later dubbed Finis Hominis,
like the Brazilian title, seems to have walked out of the seas completely
naked. Played by Marins himself, he
appears to be able to perform miracles and continually intervenes in different
situations around the town he's appeared in, developing followers and raising
questions from the officials and government. On a surface level, it's a
spiritual film, Catholic even. A potential messiah figure who helps the people.
Possibly a conservative film, because one scene shows this man distrust hippies
in their faithfulness in their ideology. But it's a lot more complex than this
even for an exploitation film. First of all, as an exploitation film, and one
from a director whose had little budget to work with usually, and
significantly, someone who had his previous work get into trouble with the
Brazilian government, Awakening of the
Beast (1970) one year earlier completely banned. Even though the film,
altogether, is completely unconservative in idea at least, the level of how
much Marins had to deal with to even
get films made would affect the final results. That and it still had a lot of titillation
and sex. Baring in mind that subtitles for the versions I saw are in question
in quality, the actual ideas in Marin's
films can be contradictory or vague, especially in his tendency to have long
onscreen monologues to the viewers. But there's clearly more going on in this
film regardless of that factor, and many others, which make than more
interesting than being mere genre films. It feels like entire ideologies
alongside Brazilian culture are being collided in the films messily, and the
director can catch you off guard with some of the thoughts he brings up in
them. Such as the abrupt ending of this one, out of the book of ending plot
twists for horror films, which questions the whole tone of the film narrative
before it. Even if religion is treated well here, it feels more like the
spirituality not the organised religion that is treated with more respect.
Certainly Marins has no love for officials or groups, a cynical look at
people in general inflected in his work. Even if Coffin Joe was defeated, he
got the words on about others being lead by blind faith or questionable behaviour
as wrong as his. Hypocritical middle class or deluded individuals. Hospitals
are staffed by the lazy in this film, and the police will arrest anyone just
because they look suspicious. An entire passage of the narrative, an entirely
different story, is of a family conspiring to off their wealthy uncle. Even
with the hippies, it's because the potential messiah throws coins between them
all, thus proving that they would sell themselves out very easily. Marins is too enamoured with having
messages or lengthy speeches in his films to outright dismiss their point in
them, even if they clutter and fall on each other abruptly. One detail that especially
works with this film, which he expressed in the documentary The Strange World of Jose Mojica Marins
(2001), is where he described being a religious man who went to mass all
the time, only to be late to one and refused in a crude manner by a priest to
be able to go into the church, leading to Marins
never going to church again. The films, even if God did win, are completely sceptical
about the point of the organised, material religion, flat out desecrating it. An
apparently religious film like this - also bearing in mind its twist ending
where, (Spoiler Warning) it turns out Finis Hominis is from a hospital for the
psychologically disturbed rather than a messiah (Spoiler Ends) - its more the case that a man
can do so much more, even cause a woman to be able to walk again and more such
miracles in unconventional ways, while a religious leader or official group are
completely useless. Finis Hominis is for peace, unity and love in his message,
but the film has complete disregard for people, especially those of higher
classes, palpably. Its mocking yet doesn't concern itself with mocking
spirituality because its people themselves the director has to put up with.
It's a rough film, in pace and
content. I didn't like the first viewing of these films at all, and it was
because they're very slowly paced and messy in structure. Sex scenes take an
incredibly long time to play out, even if you see little. The rich uncle
subplot is an unexpectedly long segment
by itself. And there is a lot of repetition, same vignettes and
stiltedness to many scenes. It's a film made from what could be found and done.
But this rough unpredictability, like the politics, is what makes this now so
more compelling as an exploitation film. The film begins with a lengthy
prologue of the destiny of mankind before the story starts proper, which is
disjarring from what is usually expected in this sort of cinema, but breaks
from monotonous structure. The tangents are frequent, abrupt music cues in a
languid and lengthy moments, which yet make sense when the audible pun, or
accidental displacement, happens when you react to it, and you can feel that
the editing was sudden to get the film finished. There's even an interesting switch
between colour and purplish monochrome at times, that could have been the
limited film stock Marins actually
had at hand or on purpose. It's the work of someone who makes films to be able
to make more films, the content and the obsessions showing that he was
interested in each film's content before he went to a new one.
The murkiness of the ideas feel
like an overactive mind that is having to work around the concepts, and its messiness
befits the complicatedness of it. It's the pulpiest of low budget genre cinema
- very roughly made and sketched out, padding the running time out - but what
makes me really interested in Marins
is how his work has always been like this. In desperation or inspiration, the
quirks of his work stand out - echoed distorted sound, bizarre images, odd
colour and film grain tones, disjointed plot tangents, all amplified in a compelling
way. The style is entirely his own, but any of these traits would immediately
make more of a fascinating and entertaining viewing experience by themselves. Its
ramshackle, but the chaos makes the results more vivid and distinct. Rather
than viewing them as fascinating failures, a film like The End of Man is so much a better film than a "better"
made one. Its directing ideas with more interest in them within itself. The
flaws are amusing, and the moments that do work stand out. The coarseness of
the whole film adds character that cannot be gained just making something
ordinary. I can't claim yet that Marins
is a great director, because the work is too inconsistent in tone, but the
films give so much more of what it's like to have been in Brazil at the time,
stood watching him film scenes outside with extras that were the local populous.
In this satire of a religious messiah, he benefits from not mocking
Christianity cheaply, but people themselves when reacting to a messiah figure
appearing, even considering using him to promote commercial goods. Heavy handed
yes, but the point still stands strongly to learn from even from this film. The
roughness shows this is the work of an ordinary man, not some vague studio
system, and the only real objection you could have is the one that surrounds
exploitation films is the amount of sexualisation of actresses but not of the
males. Whether you object to the sexualisation or not. But this is an issue
that has to be brought up with every film including those presumed to be
feminist. And it also depends on if we ever got films where the actors were
just as equally sexualised as the actresses, or if Marins could have actually written female characters equivalent to
a Coffin Joe in a film or two. Aside from that, a ramshackle film like this is
more entertaining it what fails to do, as well as in how it succeeds, than just
doing the same thing again glossily made.
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