A woman lies on the hood of a turbocharged car and rubs it sensually and passionately. She glues her face to the bodywork, climbs onto the icy structure and is swept away by a heady surge of pleasure. The scene could have been part of Titane, winner of last year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but is actually in the national Carro Rei, which hits theaters this week.
Similar to the French film, the feature film by Renata Pinheiro deals with the relationship between man and machine and uses, among other things, a sex scene in which Mercedes a character with a meaningful name and an incomprehensible accent can be seen lovingly desire and sexually, the vehicle that gives “Carro Rei” its name.
However, Pinheiro likes to make it clear that the car in his film is not a fetish like in “Titane”. He’s a complete character, with feelings and motivations, and he’s headed for a dystopia that’s not far off.
“The films are similar in that they deal with transhumanism,” she says of the concept that humans will evolve through technology, not biology. “‘Carro Rei’ is an observation of human existence, where we are going,” Pinheiro continues.
“The car becomes a metaphor for technology itself, for a phenomenon that has become more aggressive with social networks, with technology even electing presidents. And beyond that, the car is a symbol of social advancement, to the point of expanding the human body to make people feel more potent.”
The film begins with a pregnant woman in the back seat of a taxi having to give birth after an accident disrupts traffic. From her the protagonist is born, a boy with the ability to talk to the vehicle that served as his motherhood. After years of rejecting his “superpower,” he decides to embrace that ability, dropping out of agroecology college and taking over his parents’ taxi coop.
With the help of his uncle, the role of Matheus Nachtergaele, he then modernizes the entire fleet and installs a device that allows cars to talk to anyone. When a law threatens to immobilize the oldest vehicles in Caruaru, Pernambuco, he begins turbocharging all the cars around him and metalizing the landscape.
“The character of Matheus goes through an involution, he gets wilder as he gets stronger. He’s a manmachine that increasingly adopts animalistic gestures, showing that attachment to technology makes us less human or more friendly and individualistic.”
For his role in “Carro Rei”, Nachtergaele received a special award at the last Gramado Festival. It was joined by four other trophies for production Sound, Art Direction, Music and Best Picture. Pinheiro had expectations in the technical categories but says he was shocked to learn that he had won the event’s top prize.
According to her, who has Steven Spielberg and his ET: The Extraterrestrial as a reference, the choice shows her film has audience potential, something that’s hard to match in the more independent cinema she does — they’re, for example her feature “Love, Plastic and Noise” and also the look of “Tatuagem” and “Árido Movie” were created while she was still acting as art director.
With Gramado’s grand prize under her arm, she is now preparing “Vago”, a film that is still in its early stages but will unite Marcélia Cartaxo and Pedro Wagner in a plot about a middleaged woman who finds her past in one of the oldest Quarters in Recife, Boa Vista. She delves into a tangle of references to the resident Clarice Lispector, in a flirtation with the fantastical genre.