City of Fury: Urban Violence, Dystopia and Anti-Utopia in Nuevo orden and Era Uma Vez Brasília

Abstract

In the twenty-first century Latin America has become the most urbanized region on the planet and, at the same time, the one that has the highest level of inequality. This article discusses how this tension is expressed in cinema, an eminently urban art, through two case studies: the Mexican Nuevo orden (dir. by Michel Franco, 2020) and the Brazilian film Era uma vez Brasília (dir. by Adirley Queirós, 2017). Both works are independent films that deal with issues of urban violence and authoritarianism through a distinct style that combines the techniques of realist representation with fictional elements borrowed from dystopian and science fiction genres. While the two show a preoccupation with the economic and racialized inequality that characterizes urban space in the capital cities of Mexico and Brazil, they ultimately evoke two modes of utopian discourse. Whereas the first film can be considered anti-utopian, criticizing the impulse to seek social change, the second one, though pessimistic, retains a utopian call for political action.

From lettered city to cinematic city

Urban life and the written word have been interconnected in Latin America since the Spanish and Portuguese colonized the continent. In his seminal work La ciudad letrada [The Lettered City], Ángel Rama traces the history of the modern Latin American city to an eminently lettered enterprise, in which the building of cities was determined by the written sign – in the form of urban plans, edicts, laws, correspondence and other related documents. As Rama writes, ‘before their appearance as material entities, cities had to be constructed as symbolic representations’.¹ If in Europe major cities emerged by and large in an unorganized way, in the Americas they were the consequence of deliberate planning. When new cities were built on the same sites of existing ones, such as in Mexico City or Cuzco, the Conquistadors razed the indigenous buildings to the ground rather than try to reconfigure or build upon the existing structures. This process entailed the creation of a world anew, informed by an imagination in which a notion of the modern was already emerging: order, organization and functionality are some of the ideas that prevailed in urban planning during the colonial era. An essential ideological component in this process was a sense of social hierarchies that imposed a system of domination and inequality on the city and its inhabitants, supported by symbolic culture as much as physical violence.

The focus of Rama’s study, more than cities themselves, is the group of intellectuals (writers, journalists, professors, lawyers) defined as letrados, or the lettered elite, as José Eduardo González notes, even though, for Rama, ‘the city becomes a central entity in shaping the history of Latin America from the conquest to the twentieth century’.² Latin American cities, writes Rama, ‘sprang forth in signs and plans, already complete, in the documents that laid their statutory foundations and in the charts and plans that established their ideal designs’.³ Rama sees here a (theoretical) connection between classical architecture and classical utopia: ‘the dreams of architects (Alberti, Filarete, Vitruvius) and designers of utopias (More, Campanella) came to little in material terms, but they fortified the order of signs’.⁴ The sign – alphabetical, architectural, cartographical – enabled both urban development and a territorial order of domination that emanated from urban centres. This process, however, cannot be described as utopian: it was not driven by the desire to construct a fairer and more equal society, but by the need to impose a form of administration, control and subjugation over the conquered lands effectively. Much later, in the early nineteenth century, the independence movements in the region, imagined and advocated in the first instance by the letrados, may have been more closely connected to utopianism, since they were informed by the ideals of republicanism, emancipation and freedom. Eventually, however, the newly formed national governments reproduced to a large extent the racialized structures of inequality and class hegemonies that were the legacy of European rule.

Adrián Gorelik situates Rama’s book at the end of a very specific historical moment in Latin America (the early 1960s and 1970s) in which ‘la ciudad dejaba de ser pensada como el laboratorio principal para el desarrollo de la región, palanca para su transformación modernizadora, y comenzaba a verse con desconfianza, como obstáculo principal a cualquier transformación efectiva’ [the city ceased to be thought of as the main laboratory for the development of the region or lever for a modernizing transformation and started being viewed with distrust, as a key barrier against effective change].⁵ Yet La ciudad letrada is particularly important, argues Gorelik, because it introduces the idea of the Latin American city as a key construct of social imagination and shows the extent to which the preoccupation with urban space reached cultural and literary debates. The association between letrados and power was broken during the Cold War, according to Jean Franco, particularly in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution (which started as a rural movement – albeit one led by lettered individuals).⁶ By the 1960s, argues Franco, the project of creating modern, republican nations in the region, ‘born of the Enlightenment and monumentalized in Latin American cities’, had come to an end.⁷ This notion, however, should not be mistaken for a decline of the broader cultural relevance of the Latin American city, which continues to be the object of imagination and speculation not only in literary but also in cinematic production.

In the early twentieth century, as Barbara Mennel argues, modernity was embodied both by cities and by the cinema.⁸ From its emergence in 1895, cinema was an eminently urban art. In fact, Mark Shiel describes a cinema-city nexus in which the cultural form that is cinema on the one hand, and urban spatial organization on the other, are two conflated variables that feed back into each other in multiple ways.⁹ As Tony Fitzmaurice notes, ‘the city is constructed as much by images and representations as by the built environment, demographic shifts, land speculation, and patterns of capital flight and investment’.¹⁰ In Latin America as in Europe, film production was, and continues to be, located in its principal cities (most often, though not exclusively, national capitals), where film studios are also clustered. Cinema, in fact, was an essential form for generating and promoting ideals of nationhood and national identities across the region. As such it might be possible to argue that the notion of the ‘lettered city’ was challenged by, among other factors, the dissemination of cinema, which also introduced the idea of the ‘popular’ as a notion that is at odds with cultivated forms of literary expression.

In the twenty-first century, when the majority of Latin American countries have returned to democratic rule, the space of the city as a producer of politically and culturally inflected signs flourishes along with the growth of urban living. Latin America has now become the most urbanized region in the planet – even ahead of Europe.¹¹ The cinematic sign may not have fully replaced the alphabet, the map and the architectural blueprint when it comes to formulating political and urban projects, but it has become an important factor in visualizing the experience of urban life in the region, where cinema has fulfilled a role similar to that in Europe, in which, as Mennel notes, the ‘coherence of modernity defines architecture and urban planning, on the one hand, and modern film and art, on the other’.¹² Here, following Néstor García Canclini, I prefer to speak of the belated and deficient modernization of Latin America,¹³ where urban growth in the last decades ceased to be the consequence of careful planning and became, in the words of Fernando Aínsa, ‘arbitrario, ruidoso y confuso’ [arbitrary, noisy and confusing].¹⁴ In Latin American cities, argues Aínsa, ‘ya no se reconoce el sosegado pasado colonial o el entusiasmado ingreso a la modernidad finisecular del siglo xix, simbolizado en el trazado de grandes paseos y bulevares’ [one no longer recognizes the sedate colonial past and the enthusiastic entry into modernity at the turn of the nineteenth century, symbolized by the design of wide avenues and boulevards].¹⁵

The failures of the modernization projects (imbued with a utopian spirit) undertaken by Latin American political and economic elites in the twentieth century and the increasing social violence that characterizes the region, are evident in two recent films produced in Mexico and Brazil – Nuevo orden [New Order], directed by Michel Franco,¹⁶ and Era uma vez Brasília [Once There Was Brasília] directed by Adirely Queirós,¹⁷ – which are the focus of this article. Both works articulate an ideology that stems from utopianism with the aim of speculating on the outcome of movements of urban resistance and reaction against the established order. Thus, the two films are connected to the project of imagining the urban as an arena for political and economic confrontation, in which the city contains the classes and social groups that clash over access to material and symbolical resources. However, as I will argue, the two films offer different takes on the utopian impulse: while in Nuevo orden the possibility of change is portrayed as a doomed, grotesque and senseless movement towards ultimate chaos and cruelty, Era uma vez Brasília (EUVB), on the other hand, though pessimistic, still proposes that inequality can be fought through collective action. Both films also demonstrate the persistence of the concept of a national cinema, embodied in the capital cities of Mexico and Brazil, even in what is considered an age of globalization, as a platform for exploring the imaginaries that underline national identity.

The city upside down: ‘Nuevo orden’ and anti-utopianism

Michel Franco is an independent Mexican filmmaker whose works are as controversial as they are provocative. A prolific auteur in the classic Cahiers du Cinéma sense, he writes, produces and directs his own films, which have received awards in the Cannes and Venice film festivals.¹⁸ His work has been compared with that of other contemporary directors, such as Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke, whose films tend to be described as cold, challenging and excessively cruel.¹⁹ Released in 2020, the plot of Nuevo orden is straightforward and, with the exception of an initial sequence, told in a linear way. It is the story of a violent uprising in Mexico City seen mostly from the point of view of a wealthy family. A short summary is important to understand how utopia and the urban are articulated at the centre of the film’s highly problematic ideological discourse.

A short opening sequence made up of unconnected images anticipates the chaotic events that will unfold: an abstract painting; a long shot of a naked woman (full body on screen) standing against a long white wall, green paint dripping down her exposed belly; furniture being thrown down into a courtyard; a cascade of green-coloured water pouring down a staircase;²⁰ the woman seen before now trying on a wedding dress, while somebody throws a bucket of green paint against the shop’s window (among other images). The shots act as pieces of a puzzle that the audience will be able to understand retrospectively, but edited together they serve to generate a feeling of unease and confusion. The sequence is scored by Dimitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11, which, as Maria Delgado notes, commemorates the Russian Revolution of 1905.²¹ This political event was characterized by widespread social protests and riots (thus anticipating much of what is to come in the film). The sequence is followed by a short scene: inside a hospital, a group of elderly patients are removed from their beds to make room for injured people who appear to have stormed the place.

The above acts like a prologue and is followed by a long sequence (almost half of the total running time of 85 minutes). The action takes place in an elegant, luxurious residence in Jardines del Pedregal, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Mexico City. The house is located on a quiet, leafy street; its architecture is decidedly modern, with flat roofs and straight lines. From outside it looks almost like a bunker, with concrete walls and a solid gate, designed to maximize privacy and protection. Inside, a wedding ceremony is about to take place, attended by what are evidently members of the Mexican elite. It is a scene of happiness: the bride, Marianne Novelo, and the bridegroom, dance together, guests greet each other and maids and waiters prepare and serve food. At the same time, the wedding is a scenario for the circulation of capital, a subtle though repeated event involving the invitees, who, as they arrive, pass on envelopes with cash to the young couple getting married (a common wedding gift across Latin America, not limited to the super-rich). The bride’s mother, Rebeca, is in charge of collecting the envelopes and storing them in a safe in her bedroom.

One of the guests, Víctor, has a position of political power in the city. He is greeted by Marianne’s father and brother at the entry gate as soon as he arrives and he delivers the good news that he has just secured the planning permission they had been seeking. The film takes care not to over-explain what is happening, but it can be inferred that this refers to an urban development scheme, which Marianne’s brother, an architect, will design. The moment underlines David Harvey’s point that there is an ‘intimate connection between the development of capitalism and urbanisation’ in which the ‘perpetual need to find profitable terrains for capital-surplus production and absorption shapes the politics of capitalism’.²² To this notion one could add the problem, arguably intensified in Latin America, of corruption associated with urban development. Again, as a passing reference, it is hinted that Víctor has received countless bribes from Mr Novelo in order to authorize their construction projects (the envelopes with cash also hint at the way in which bribes are exchanged). None of this will be revisited in the film, but the links between urban development, capital and corruption have been established.

As the wedding party progresses, the main marker of the unequal structure of Mexican society and the racialized basis for social stratification is obvious. Marianne, the groom, their families and all the guests are manifestly white, whereas the maids, bodyguards and service personnel in general are of indigenous or mestizo origin, underlying that inequality in the city is tied to ethnic roots and skin colour.²³ As the party progresses, a few minor references hint that there is some kind of social disturbance in the city (guests complain of traffic jams and some arrive with splashes of green paint on their clothes) but nobody thinks the situation is serious enough to cancel the ceremony. A former employee, Rolando, unexpectedly arrives at the gate and asks to see Rebeca. He is in a desperate situation: it turns out that his wife, who had been about to undergo cardiac surgery at a public hospital, was one of the patients who had been forced to leave her bed by the protesters (which suggests that lower-class people are also victims of the ongoing unrest). The only option left is to take her to a private clinic, at the cost of 200,000 Mexican pesos to be paid upfront, which is much more than Rolando can afford. Compared to the surrounding wealth, this is a minor amount, but still sufficiently large that Rebeca does not have the cash to hand. She gives Rolando about 40,000 pesos and asks him to leave.

Rolando’s appearance acts as an anticipatory symbol of what is to come. Suddenly, a large group of people invades the lavish house. The Novelos and guests watch in horror as they climb the tall walls that encircle the gardens and jump inside. This moment is shot from a handheld camera, relying on the horizontal pan rather than editing to move between guests and intruders, emphasizing the sense of immediacy and danger. Events now escalate rapidly and violently. The intruders are armed and open fire at some of the guests. Rebeca is brought to her bedroom and ordered to open the safe, then killed on the spot. Other guests are forced to hand over their personal belongings (wallets, mobile phones) amid the general turmoil. The story seems to be following the tropes of the heist film or the thriller, but the techniques of naturalist representation used so far (natural lighting, real locations, diegetic music and some non-professional actors) reinforce the feeling of discomfort and disgust at what is going on. However, if we focus on the intruders, the film looks closer to the mainstream Hollywood action or horror film, in which the antagonists are shown as an anonymous mass of racialized Others. All of the intruders are poor and dark-skinned, often with indigenous features. On this basis, it is not surprising that Paul Julian Smith has labelled Nuevo orden ‘the most controversial Latin American film of [2021]’.²⁴ On its release, the film generated a media backlash in Mexico as it was accused of depicting the capital’s class divide in a racist manner, and director Franco was accused of being a ‘whitexican’ (a racist and classist Mexican with a lighter skin tone).²⁵ Delgado defends the director, noting that ‘what Franco demonstrates with shocking candour is that abuses are disproportionately enacted on women, the poor and the marginalised’.²⁶ However, this first sequence only shows the wealthy, white elite as the victims of cruel violence enacted by the poor, portrayed as greedy and bloodthirsty. The second part of the film illustrates Delgado’s point better, though the main female victim is the blonde and light-skinned Marianne.

As chaos unfolds in the house, Marianne has been spared because she has gone out in search of Rolando, willing to pay for the operation with her credit card. Helped by Cristian, a young servant, they drive towards his lower-class neighbourhood and for the first time the film offers a glimpse of the city beyond the enclave of the rich. The streets have become a portrait of anarchy: crowds running around, stores being looted, fires raging. As darkness falls, Marianne has no choice but to spend the night at Cristian’s, but the following morning a series of shots paint a bleak, almost post-apocalyptic portrait of the Mexican cityscape, described as ‘Hieronymus Boschian’ by Ryan Lattanzio.²⁷ Throughout the streets, littered with debris, lie abandoned cars, crashed or burnt. The soundtrack is made up of sirens and gunfire, with occasional shouts. Military trucks and helicopters move in the direction of the city centre. A series of long shots allow for an encompassing view of the situation there. In Masaryk Avenue, one of the most exclusive high streets in the capital, we see a large Louis Vuitton shop with its windows cracked and splashed with paint, bodies strewn across the pavement and a hanged man dangling from a streetlight, a rope around his bent neck. The Paseo de la Reforma looks like a war zone: columns of smoke are rising up, some buildings are on fire, with the Columna de la Independencia [Independence Column] occupying the centre of the frame – connoting perhaps the failure of independence to lead towards a modern, functional state. In another shot the military inspects bodies lying in an improvised campsite set up by the protesters. One of the soldiers, realizing somebody might still be alive, takes up a pistol and shoots him.

At this stage the film has only reached its halfway point and it will continue to offer no respite. The uprising is suppressed, although in the attempt to regain control of the city the military imposes an interruption of the rule of law that can be described, following philosopher Giorgio Agamben, as a state of exception – a legal device that allows a political system to suspend civil liberties and human rights, in what are deemed exceptional circumstances.²⁸ Modern totalitarianism, according to Agamben, can be defined ‘come l’instaurazione, attraverso lo stato di eccezione, di una guerra civile legale, che permette l’eliminazione fisica […] di intere categorie di cittadini che per qualche ragione risultino non integrabili nel sistema politico’ [as the establishment, through the state of exception, of a legal civil war, which allows the physical elimination […] of entire categories of citizens who, for some reason, may result as being not compatible with the political system].²⁹ In Nuevo orden the state of exception is seen in the curfews and check-points set across the city, which prevent working-class citizens from leaving their neighbourhoods (unless they can demonstrate they are doing so for work – i.e. for the benefit of the middle and upper classes) and in the systematic killings ordered by the military. The murder of citizens with impunity by those in power illustrates another feature that defines the state of exception: the homo sacer. The term is based on the distinction that the ancient Greeks made in relation to the term life. Agamben notes that the Greeks had two different words to express the concept: zoē and bios. Whereas zoē refers to the mere fact of being alive, in a natural sense (equally valid for humans and animals), bios refers to a specific kind of life, the qualified life of human beings living in a polis. Bare life, or zoē, is thus the kernel of natural life present in a human being, bereft of any political, social and cultural features. A person reduced to this condition is, in the words of Agamben, ‘uccidible’ [killable].³⁰ That is to say, deprived of rights, the homo sacer is somebody who can be killed without any legal consequences for the executioners.

The second part of the film is perhaps even darker than the first, since here the focus is concentrated on the harrowing experience of Marianne. She is found by a military squadron but, instead of being rescued, she is taken to a secret detention centre in what appears to be an abandoned factory or military barracks. Taking advantage of the reigning confusion, this group of soldiers have decided to turn to crime and kidnapping citizens for ransom. While a prisoner, Marianne is numbered, asked to record a proof of life for her family, and then tortured and sexually abused. Thus the motif of the rich, white Mexican as a victim of the barbarous Other is repeated. At the same time, the scene illustrates the practices of the detention camp, in which prisoners are deprived of their humanity. Camps and detention centres represent, for Agamben, the matrix (or nomos) of our current society, in which human beings are reduced to the status of homo sacer.³¹ Eventually, the military discovers the rogue unit, but instead of detaining the criminals and releasing the prisoners, they kill all of them indiscriminately, so as to eliminate any witnesses who could damage the image of the security forces.

The representation of difference in the film is therefore reduced to its most stereotypical level, although one could still argue that, independently of the conclusions that can be drawn about the film’s ideology, Nuevo orden nevertheless denounces the class divide in Mexico City. The elite is white and the subaltern citizens are fully or partially indigenous. If, in our contemporary, consumerist cities, as Harvey argues, ‘we increasingly live in divided and conflict-prone urban areas’,³²Nuevo orden takes this premise to its ultimate expression, demonstrating how inequality can be spatialized in an urban context. This spatialization of difference is ultimately sustained through the use of force, and the film could thus also be read as critique of militarism in the contemporary Mexican context. In a country marked by different kinds of social violence, including the one generated by the ‘war on drugs’ policies undertaken in the last two decades, which involved mobilizing the army in an attempt to pacify the nation, Nuevo orden shows that military intervention is not a sensible strategy to deal with internal conflicts. The final sequence of the film illustrates the normalization of Mexican citizens being deprived of their political and legal rights, reduced to the status of bare life. It begins with a close-up shot of a large Mexican flag flapping in the wind. It is a point of view shot from a moving car, but we never see a counter-shot that reveals the identity of the person looking at the flag. Therefore, the shot becomes an act of interpellation addressed at the audience. It is also dusk, which implies incoming darkness. This is followed by a scene filmed in broad daylight. Dozens of people who had participated in the uprising await their turn to be executed by hanging, before the attentive gaze of the military and political authorities. The soundtrack consists of the first chords of the Mexican National Anthem, which continues to be played over the end credits once the screen has faded to black. Thus, the film denounces the totalitarian, repressive dictatorship into which Mexico has fallen.³³

The above might suggest a more positive reading of the film as a critique of repression and state violence, but a more problematic underside of Nuevo orden emerges if it is approached from the perspective of utopian studies. Utopianism is, as Ruth Levitas argues, embedded ‘in a wide range of human practice and culture – in the individual and collective creative practices of art as well as in its reproduction and consumption’.³⁴ As a narrative genre, utopias express a dissatisfaction with the present and imagine alternative societies that are understood as better (eutopia) or worse (dystopia) than the context in which the utopian text is produced.³⁵ Several reviewers and critics have read New Order as a dystopia³⁶ while others consider it a thriller or drama.³⁷ In my opinion, however, while the film should be located within the utopian spectrum, is to be understood not as a dystopia but as an anti-utopian text – a subgenre of the utopian that refutes the possibility of utopian change and that, as Fredric Jameson notes, ‘is informed by the central passion to denounce and to warn against Utopian programs in the political realm’.³⁸ Meanwhile, Lucy Sargisson has noted that anti-utopianism, which can be traced back to Edmund Burke’s philosophical rejection of revolutionary practice (stemming from his view of the French Revolution),³⁹ expresses fears about the potential outcomes of a progressive utopian project, including the concern that it would lead ‘to mob rule and mass violence’.⁴⁰

By offering a scenario in which class antagonism in the city erupts into a senseless violence that does not follow any specific, collective aim of improving living conditions or reducing inequality, the film’s discourse becomes anti-utopian, not only in its fear of change and the Other, but also in its disavowed call for resignation and even complicity with the existing form of social organization, additional characteristics of the anti-utopia.⁴¹ Although modern Mexico emerged out of a progressive if ultimately flawed revolution, Nuevo orden makes a strong argument against collective mobilization seeking political change. Society may be sharply unequal, it suggests, but an attempt to overthrow this system will lead to an alternative order that is worse than the original one. The destruction of key symbols of consumer capitalism, such as the Louis Vuitton store or the art objects at the Novelos’s residence, are therefore not critical gestures but ultimately a denunciation of the devastation brought about by the attempt to redistribute wealth.

This pessimism is symbolized in the ubiquitous green paint used by the protesters. Colours constitute an important code imbued with meaning in Nuevo orden. The opening shot is a close-up of the large painting that will later be seen adorning one of the walls in the Novelo home (by contemporary Mexican artist Omar Rodríguez-Graham). It is an abstract composition of multiple shapes and colours clashing against each other, connoting not harmony but disorder and confrontation.⁴² But the most significant colour coding, I would contend, is seen in the film’s use of red and green, which echo the Mexican flag (which is, as mentioned above, seen at the centre of the frame in various shots throughout). The elegant suit that Marianne is wearing at the wedding and during the first half of the story is bright red. The colour green, however, recurrent on screen from the opening sequence, is the main signifier. Traditionally associated with ecology and environmentalism, the colour green normally has positive connotations. In Nuevo orden, nevertheless, it becomes a sign of the indiscriminate and sadistic violence of the protesters, who are never shown to be driven by specific political objectives or demands.

Discussing the urban riots that took place across the United Kingdom in 2011, Slavoj Žižek writes:

The sad fact that opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a coherent utopian project, but only takes the form of meaningless outburst, is a grave indictment of our epoch. What function does our celebrated freedom of choice serve when the only choice is effectively between playing by the rules and (self-) destructive violence?⁴³

This is precisely the premise lying at the heart of Nuevo orden’s discourse, taken to its ultimate extreme. However, as mentioned, rather than criticizing a lack of utopian, progressive political action, the film redirects the focus away from the pervading class divide in Mexico City through its racist fear of the Other. This mechanism can also be explained by Žižek’s understanding of contemporary capitalism, in which ‘the standard way of disavowing an antagonism […] is to project the cause of that antagonism onto a foreign intruder who stands for the threat to society as such, for the anti-social element, for its excremental excess’.⁴⁴ Žižek draws on the example of anti-Semitism and the figure of the Jew to illustrate this intruder, though in Nuevo orden the same process takes place with the non-white inhabitants of the city.⁴⁵ This order, however, is inverted in the critique made in Era uma vez Brasília.

The imagination of disaster between Brasília and Ceilândia

Adirley Queirós is, like Franco, an independent filmmaker who writes and directs his own works, which tend to combine documentary and ethnography, occasionally drawing on the tropes of science fiction. In addition, the director is based, and shoots his films, in Ceilândia, a working-class area on the outskirts of the Brazilian capital. The strained dynamic between Brasília and Ceilândia is eloquently described by Queirós himself:

Brasilia’s relationship with the peripheries that I depict has always been very tense, because when the satellite city was created, the people were expelled to it from the city center. We are talking about the fact that, for the most part, the workers who constructed Brasilia didn’t get to actually live there. They were all pushed out. In this sense, Brasilia is a city that doesn’t exist – it doesn’t exist because we, the residents from the periphery, can’t relate to it, we have no access to its everyday life. For us, Brasilia is a postcard city, a holographic projection. We don’t get to occupy its public spaces, even if some of us actually work there. And so it represents to us the power with which we aren’t able to interact. We also must remember that the population of the periphery, of Ceilândia and other areas, is far, far bigger than of the center, but Brasilia, the city, is the Brazilian elite.⁴⁶

One could imagine the indigenous, marginalized protagonists of Nuevo orden making the same observation about their own relation to urban space. However, it should be noted that Brasília is a unique city in modern history: it was planned and built from scratch in the late 1950s, in a process spearheaded by President Juscelino Kubitschek, with the aim of it becoming the new national capital, seat of the main branches of the republican government. Brasília was conceived as a modern city that would epitomize the industrial progress of the nation, integrate its population and contribute to the overall development of Brazil. Such a project, writes James Holston, ‘presents a fundamentally utopian premise: that the design and organization of Brasilia were meant to transform Brazilian society’.⁴⁷ Brasília was intended to become a pole of development for the nation, and was conceived as a place that would not disaggregate its residents on the basis of social class, thus avoiding the spatialization of difference. But, as Adrián Gorelik writes, Brasília was the dream that became a nightmare.⁴⁸

The notion that the city-building project became a failed experiment is underlined in Queirós’s Era uma vez Brasília, a peculiar example of science fiction cinema. While its design, as some critics have pointed out, borrows from the post-apocalyptic mise-en-scène of films such as Mad Max (dir. by George Miller, 1979) and Blade Runner (dir. by Ridley Scott, 1982),⁴⁹ this is an unconventional work of art cinema rather than one that follows the conventions of genre cinema. It is almost entirely non-narrative and told through long takes, in a contemplative style that seeks to emphasize mood rather than story. Unlike Nuevo orden, the film unfolds entirely at night and its scenes are barely lit, reinforcing the overall sense of darkness and pessimism it conveys.

The plot is simple and deliberately implausible. The main protagonist is Wellington Abreu, also known as WA4, an ‘intergalactic agent’ from the planet of Kaspenthal, which in the language of its people means ‘rising sun’.⁵⁰ Abreu had been imprisoned in his home planet (never shown on screen) for illegally grabbing land (he wanted to build a house for his family – thus implying that inequality and homelessness are universal phenomena). The authorities offer him an early release if he volunteers for a mission: travel to planet Earth, land in Brasília and murder President Kubitschek as he is about to inaugurate Brasília in April 1960. However, WA4 arrives not only in the wrong place, Ceilândia, but at the wrong time, on 21 April 2016, the day on which the incumbent Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, was formally impeached by the national parliament – a highly controversial affair which for millions of Brazilians amounted to a soft coup d’état. Unsure of what to do, WA4 meets a group of underground rebels and decides to join them in order to combat the ruling political elite.

Discussing the cinematography and settings of Blade Runner, one of the most emblematic urban dystopias in science fiction cinema, Janet Staiger notes that its dilapidated cityscape creates a ‘semantics of decline’,⁵¹ whereas Giuliana Bruno speaks similarly of ‘an aesthetic of decay, exposing the dark side of technology, the process of disintegration’.⁵² The same aesthetics are reproduced in EUVB. The urban sprawl of Ceilândia is one of the central devices through which meaning is produced, with locations that denote a broken, post-industrial society: empty streets with abandoned and burnt chassis of cars and rusty piles of garbage lying around, poorly lit pedestrian overpasses and tunnels and desolate wastelands. The costumes of the protagonists and the props they use also follow a retro-futuristic look: WA4 wears a black spacesuit which seems to be made of rubber and his weapon seems like a homemade arquebus. His spaceship is simply the empty interior of a passenger van, with a few precarious controls and nothing else. Marquim, who leads the motley group of rebels, wears an equally improvised set of body armour made of a chest plate and what appears to be a welding helmet.⁵³ As in Blade Runner, retrofitting is the key visual technique used to create the sense of an estranged, atemporal world.

In contrast, the film includes very precise temporal markings through voice-over recordings made of statements given by Brazilian politicians during the impeachment proceedings against Rousseff. In some cases, the characters listen to these statements on the radio, but in others they have been added in non-diegetic form to the soundtrack, juxtaposed with images that are completely unrelated. Thus, we hear the voices of Rousseff, Michel Temer (the vice-president who succeeded her once she was removed from office) and various senators who express their views, overwhelmingly in favour of the impeachment. These speeches, as well as some of the back stories of the protagonists, which are based on the real-life histories of the actors, provide a basis of real facts that the film combines with the fiction of the space traveller and the estranged cityscape. For this reason, Lucas de Souza considers the film a ‘science-fiction documentary’,⁵⁴ whereas Tatiana Hora speaks of a ‘dystopian documentary’.⁵⁵ While I agree that the speeches in the film play a key role in its political discourse, the way in which they are juxtaposed with the fictional story situates EUVB outside the boundaries of documentary.⁵⁶ Science fiction is not necessarily defined by futuristic settings or sophisticated technologies, and the film could be most accurately understood as an example of the speculative, non-spectacular approach that characterizes Latin American films of the genre – a style that Alfredo Suppia describes as ‘lo-fi sci-fi’.⁵⁷

The Ceilândia of the film, thus, is an imaginary one, which has become a police state. Patrol cars and helicopters are often seen or heard throughout the city. Occasionally, we see prisoners being transported in trains and on the metro network. It is not clear who they are or why they have been detained. Andréia, one of the protagonists, receives daily visits by the police, to check on her. Like the Mexico of Nuevo orden, this is a city ruled under the coordinates of the state of exception. Yet EUVB differs from the Mexican film in several ways. Aesthetically, it is significantly different in its use of narrative and editing. It is, as many have described it, a fragmentary film, made of sequences that are only loosely connected to each other. Nothing much happens to the characters. A group of fighters is selected to lead the resistance, joined by WA4. But there is little for them to do, except monitor the enemy. In one short scene, WA4 fires his weapon (from a long distance) at the National Congress, but without any consequences. And unlike the hyperkinetic Nuevo orden, scenes are particularly slow-paced. Shot from a fixed, static camera, characters are filmed as they drive about (or pilot the spaceship in the case of WA4), stare at incoming trains or, towards the end, a burning car. In this last case, four characters stay still, almost frozen in different positions, shot from the back as they look at the car enveloped by flames. The take runs for 3 minutes and 25 seconds. In these moments, the camera dwells on events that fulfil no narrative purposes. In my opinion, this aesthetic choice can be read as an allusion to the economic and social stagnation that the film is denouncing. If Brasília was intended to symbolize progress, in the world of the film there is no movement at all – the city and its inhabitants remain still.

A crucial textual difference is also found in the ethnic origin of the protagonists, all of whom are dark-skinned, representing the hybrid demographics of the Brazilian population, a large part of which has African ancestry. These people are excluded from society in the same way as the indigenous characters in Nuevo orden are, but here they possess defined identities and political agency. As Marquim states, their enemies are located in Congress, in ministries and in the Presidential Palace. The dissidents may well be the Other of the white powerful elite, as Ceilândia is the Other of Brasília, but the film is focused on them, and we do not see any white characters. The approach to staging the urban is also markedly different: no important buildings, monuments or avenues are shown onscreen. When the National Congress appears in one shot, it is out of focus and barely lit, making it almost impossible to identify. The focus, thus, is in the marginalized streets, train stations and wastelands of Ceilândia.

For Souza, this is a film about class struggle,⁵⁸ although no direct references are made to capital or capitalism. Its consequences, however, can be seen in the social exclusion and industrial decay already mentioned. The disintegration typical of the post-apocalyptic dystopia in the film is not only social and economic but also eminently political. The mission of the rebels is spelled out by Marquim (although it is impossible to see how they intend to carry it out): they will reclaim Congress, since it is they, ‘the people’, who are the most competent social actor for leading the nation. But nothing will ultimately be achieved by the rebels: whatever timid attempts are made at taking control, they are not effective. The last scene in the film shows the three protagonists, Wellington, Marquim and Andréia, on a bridge overpassing train tracks – one of the repeated loci of the action, as the main meeting spot of the resistance leaders. But, in line with the narrative strategy mentioned above, they are not doing anything there, apart from looking at the tracks below. At first, the soundtrack is made of noises: radio static, police sirens, a train passing below and then shots being fired. Then, however, as the characters look around to see if they can spot where the shots are coming from, another voice-over recording is played back, once again in non-diegetic form, in which we hear the now President, Michel Temer.

In the speech Temer reassures his listeners about the transparency of the process that sees him now instated as President and emphasizes that due constitutional procedures were followed, clearly attempting to legitimize his arrival in office. He situates the country at a moment of national hope, which will mark the start of a period of prosperity and economic growth. This ideal can be traced back to the one that informed the construction of Brasília in the first place: modernization, prosperity, integration. Temer also makes reference to a document that he had produced when he was still vice-president, titled ‘A Bridge to the Future’,⁵⁹ which set a roadmap of policies that would lead Brazil towards growth and progress. It is impossible not to see an ironic link between the name of this document and the ubiquitous bridge of the film. It is an almost dilapidated footbridge over some train tracks, entirely enclosed – including overhead – by a chain-link fence. Thus, whoever is on the bridge also appears to be entrapped by it. Which of the two bridges will lead to the future, we might ask? And what will that future be?⁶⁰

The creative juxtaposition of fictional images and real-life speeches in EUVB arrives at its most critical point at this moment. The pessimistic tone of the story, with its perpetual night and its dejected characters, does not suggest an upcoming victory for the dissidents. In the final shot, the three protagonists look directly at the camera, breaking the fourth wall and confronting the audience in an act of interpellation. Perhaps the audience of the film are the people that Marquim had in mind when naming those who are the legitimate owners of the institutions of the republic. However, as in Nuevo orden, no changes have been produced in the balance of power or the distribution of wealth. Can Queirós’s film be considered equally anti-utopian? The main difference between anti-utopia and dystopia is that, while both forms can be equally pessimistic about the future, the latter retains a critical aspiration, sustained by the belief that progress and social change are still possible.⁶¹ Perhaps this is the main ideological difference between the Nuevo orden and EUVB. Besides their diverging aesthetics, the two films are quite similar in other ways: the two are independent films that are deliberately challenging for audiences (the former due to its explicit violence, and the latter because of its slow, non-narrative pace).⁶² Both draw on the techniques of realistic representation (from the cinematography and soundtrack of Nuevo orden to the use of archival voices and non-professional actors in EUVB), which are combined with non-naturalistic tropes of dystopia and science fiction. Both articulate concerns about the increasing inequality and violence of the Latin American city. But the Brazilian film does not attempt to refute, in an anti-utopian fashion, the validity of pursuing a utopian project. It is undeniable that, for Queirós, the impeachment of Rousseff was a dark political moment in the country’s modern history, which would open the doors to regression rather than the progress Temer announced in his inauguration. Yet there is no sense of closure in the ending, despite the overwhelming despair that prevails at that point. Although no precise alternative is offered, at least the film proposes a positive view of utopian practice. The attempt to change society may or may not succeed, but it will not lead to lawless chaos.

The concept of an urban space that could be defined as distinctly Latin American is, according to Gorelik, culturally constructed and changes over time. The ‘ordered city’ described by Rama has disappeared. In the current century, urban space is no longer a source of modernist optimism, at the forefront of a progressive project informed by the economic philosophy of developmentalism (in the 1950s and 1960s), but it is now associated with the pressing problems of the large metropolis: ‘pobreza y marginalidad, fragmentación y violencia, tugurización de los centros históricos’ [poverty and marginality, fragmentation and violence, decay of historic city centres].⁶³ Today, Latin America has become one of the most violent regions in the world, and most of this violence is concentrated in its cities.⁶⁴ It is thus not surprising that this crucial topic finds expression in cultural production, and in particular in film, a decidedly urban form of artistic practice. The causes of urban violence are multiple and complex, and have to do with organized crime, corruption and the lack of transparency in state bodies, authoritarianism and social exclusion, among other factors.⁶⁵ Many of these variables inform the discourses of the two films discussed here, which also show how the medium can become an instrumental platform to speculate and meditate on the condition of the urban from the perspective of utopianism. Although their ideas about the utopian impulse and its potential for social change diverge, the films of Franco and Queirós denounce the unequal order of the city in racial, economic and political terms. At its worst, this can lead to reactionary works that speak against the attempt to change the status quo, but for many others, it enables the possibility to retain even a glimpse of hope in dark times.

Footnotes