News

Body

• Directed and written by Rossana Foglia and Rubens Rewald
• Starring Leonardo Medeiros and Rejane Arruda
• Classification: 18A

Sorry, but it's that moribund time of year again. You know, that post-Christmas/pre-Oscar limbo when, down at the multiplex, Hollywood is dumping its stiffs while, up at the art house, even the foreign flicks look to be on life support. Born in Brazil, then wandering the desert margins of the festival circuit, Body fits this tired pattern all too well: It opens in a morgue with a corpse laid out on the table. From there, things get deadly strange.

You may be further cheered to hear that our protagonist is Artur the coroner (Leonardo Medeiros), a lumpy and dishevelled fellow who nonetheless knows his job. Peering down at a corpse, the guy can read the cause of death like the back pages of an open book. What's more, he's just as adroit predicting the demise of the living, spying a spotty liver here or an inchoate cancer there. So these early scenes do have a certain morbid curiosity to recommend them. Excavating a perfectly good heart, or lamenting a bullet-pierced lung, Artur and his colleagues traipse through a lifeless body as they would an uninhabited house – to them, it's just a structure whose owner has departed.

All that changes, and the film along with it, when a pile of human bones shows up for examination. The forensic expert dates the bones to 40 years ago, an era when Brazil's military junta made short work of its opponents – the skeletons may or may not be political victims. But this is where matters turn truly weird. Arriving along with the remains is a still-beautiful female corpse which, showing signs of torture, piques Artur's interest. For once, he's intrigued by the house's owner, and sets out to identify her. His search through musty police files reveals a decades-old photo of a woman, a sociologist, who was interrogated by the junta and who looks identical to the body in his morgue. Huh?

Exactly. The already-murky yarn is getting downright opaque. And don't expect any enlightenment when the co-directors, Rossana Foglia and Rubens Rewald, start inserting elliptical flashbacks to, among other arcane sights, a theatre troupe cavorting naked on stage – more bodies, albeit a tad more animated than those on the morgue slabs. I repeat: Huh?

Perhaps a firmer command of Brazilian history would help to untangle these obscure narrative threads. If so, I lack it and, like a philistine trying to navigate the artsy thickets, plod on in my ignorance. To be sure, my attention is definitely caught by the appearance of the lovely Fernanda (Rejane Arruda). Claiming to be the sociologist's daughter, she visits Artur in his workplace and subsequently strips naked to seduce him. When he obliges, her body goes completely inert – yep, like a corpse. Alas, by now my tiny brain is hopelessly befuddled. Were Artur to mine it from my cranium, I'm guessing he'd be sorely disappointed.

Weighty political and philosophic issues may well be buried somewhere in this Body. But it would take an electron microscope to find them. My one epiphany came when somebody cries out, “What a crazy story.” Right back at ya', buddy. Then again, it's that time of year.