Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) (2007) is a documentary portrait of Brazil. The most important question to ask about any such portrait is “How accurate is it?” I don’t have a clue! Do you?
A secondary question is “What qualifies the film-maker to make a movie—and a serious, judgemental movie—about Brazil?” The film does not say. I think this is a weakness. Taking a cue from Aristotle, when making a public speech to persuade people about something, one of the most important things to establish is your “ethos”—this usually translates as “character” but more accurately means your qualifications to speak on the topic. It is not my job as a viewer to spend hours researching the film makers, but a quick look suggests that the driving force behind the sweeping assessment of Brazil is a young (!), American (!), making his first documentary (!), who visited Brazil several times (!). None of these characteristics prohibit him from producing a devastatingly accurate portrait of Brazil. But I wonder.
But is the film itself convincing? That is, even if you don’t know much about Brazil, and even if you don’t know who is making the argument, does the film itself convince you that it is accurate? Good documentaries instil that confidence. Who Killed the Electric Car? leaves you feeling there was a travesty of environmental justice even though you do not have an electrical engineering degree as a basis to judge the cars’ effectiveness. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room leaves you disgusted with corporate America even though you do not know the percentage of corrupt versus ethical companies in the country.
Manda Bala does not convince because we know something exists besides class warfare and ubiquitous corruption. My only personal connection with Brazil is a good friend who has adopted the country, speaks intermediate Portuguese, and has nothing but good to say about the Brazilian people as opposed to the system. Where was that in the film? My only intellectual knowledge of Brazil is of its tremendous economic clout in the Western hemisphere. How can a dysfunctional country that should be put out of its misery (send a bullet) be an economic powerhouse? Where was that addressed in the film?
This may be too much for the film to address. But it creates these expectations. The film fails to convince because it is already too wide ranging. Who Killed the Electric Car? focuses on the introduction of the electric car in California; Enron focuses on one company. But Manda Bala features a corrupt frog farmer, an apparently wealthy young woman who had her ears chopped off by kidnappers, an English-speaking businessman who bullet proofs automobiles, a masked kidnapper and murderer, an outrageously corrupt national politician, several members of the legal system, and the list goes on. We don’t get to know these people. For one thing there is not time. With some of them, you get a sense that they would be wonderful to get to know. I felt the rich girl with artificial ears showed signs of great maturity and elements of quirky humour, but when her story was done, so was she. Similarly, the kidnapper and murderer was interesting in the blasé way he went about his business, but we never go beyond his persona, in fact ending with some of his statements about financing ghetto development which sounded like grandstanding. Although some viewers have praised the interviewer’s questioning technique, I thought it failed to probe. For example, as the third or fourth question put to the major corrupt politician, the interviewer mentions the frog farm scandal, and the politician gets up and leaves the room. How is that scintillating interviewing? We already know the politician is guilty.
This film’s claim to fame is winning the 2007 Sundance Film Festival documentary award. I do not know what politics go into that award or what the competition from other films was, but I hope and I know that we can get a lot better documentaries than Manda Bala..