Pedro’s Journey Review of the film by Laís Bodansky te

In addition to starting on September 7th in the presidential election year Peter’s journey comes at an opportune time for its subjects in the Brazilian commercial circuit. The idea of ​​making a film about the last days of Dom Pedro I it comes from before, but its quest for a larger audience takes place in a context where the demand for national symbols, following instrumentalization (and mischaracterization) by farright movements in recent years, is becoming an agenda in the country.

It’s a silent negotiation at the moment, from soccer’s yellow jersey to the alien arrival of Dom Pedro’s own preserved heart in the country, but what’s in Lais Bodanzky presents itself as the centerpiece of the narrative. As well as covering the entire premise surrounding the sea voyage of the country’s first emperor to regain Portugal’s throne, the production also begins with the king and a young Dom Pedro II admiring a miniature of Napoleon, complete with the discourse on the immobility of the statues and the artificially fabricating the myths they represent.

This directness of discourse suggests an act of symbolic salvation, but in practice the game is less daring, valuing the humanization of historical character in favor of dismantling. The premise of a film spent almost entirely on a boat gradually opens up room for delirium, playing with the ailments that surrounded Dom Pedro’s health and contrasting them with the national backwardness on the issue of slavery, particularly evident in Included is the character of Isabel Zuaa who sexually visits the king. Even the figure of Caua Reymond Orbits that sphere, with the film embodying its heartthrob image through the extreme bias of decay, complete with the impotence and disheveled looks.

We then work with a camera drama doomed to wear and tear, materialized through a photographic aesthetic closer to the baroque Pedro J Marquez and the true cacophony of languages ​​filling the boat. Bodanzky follows the protagonist like a mad king, surrounding him with people to witness this humiliation, still nourished by that slow sense of suffocation, far removed from the heroism in which the action of returning and conquering Portugal is portrayed something which is even verbalized from time to time. , dismantling once and for all the position of Dom Pedro as conqueror or rebel. You don’t watch a film about independence, but you understand Dom Pedro’s journey as a great national tragedy of a king caught between two nations that, despite the efforts sponsored, are none of his business.

There’s something very conservative about that perspective, and in that sense Bodanzky’s Journey to Peter isn’t far removed from his two previous films, the contemporaries The Best Things in World and Like Our Parents. The perception of the tragedy here naturally implies a desire for a different scenario, but also a regret that also predicts an immobility, in the lack of resolution of the images one deals with. In a way this is related to the resigned view of the bourgeois dilemmas that dominated the director’s urban dramas, and in this sense one can duly see in A Viagem de Pedro a genesis of this selfinflicted reticence realized in a nobility on the run from their own responsibilities be it that of Dom Pedro in giving up Brazil or that of his parents who fled Napoleon in the past.

These findings help to explain why the moment film, unlike the progression of the characters with its provocations, does not seem to get any further, because the question is basically more rhetorical than curious. While Dom Pedro’s sufferings seem designed to be viewed from a distanced perspective, the subject of slavery sounds like a mere whim, perfect for exposing the embryonic ills of national identity. The same applies to the empresses, instruments of the protagonist’s progressivism, stifled by the intolerance of the times. What kind of intolerance would that be anyway? It is assumed that the discussion does not belong in the film.

This is where the commercial opportunism of the film’s preliminary release comes into play, because basically this immobility is not only pleasant for the narrative processes, but also has to do with this now crossed relationship with national symbols. There’s no doubt that undoing the heroic image of a reallife figure is a certain pleasure in this day and age, but undressing a king theoretically requires something beyond human sight, a new reading that involves repositioning the pictures previously taken care of left to rot. For a movie about statues, A Viagem de Pedro is a drama with the most casts.