The Red Light Bandit (1968)
Cast: Helena Ignez, Paulo Villaça, Pagano Sobrinho
Director: Rogério Sganzerla
Country: Brazil
Genre: Crime | Thriller
Rogério Sganzerla’s debut feature film literally announces its playfulness and divergence from Cinema novo with an opening sequence of multiple layers of text and sounds: on the soundtrack are overlapping voiceovers from a man and a woman uttering headline-grabbing titles like ‘Total war in the Boca do Lixo’ and describing the film as a western about the third world; a scrolling ticker display on the film, its protagonist (‘Genius or beast’?), and production credits; and a lone voiceover who speaks of being the red light bandit. The result is an inundation of information that can either draw in or dissuade the spectator. If one decides to be drawn into the world of the red light bandit and his exploits in the gritty Boca do Lixo in São Paulo, with its slippery and vibrant atmosphere, one discovers a patchwork of genres (film noir, western), images, and sounds whose mischievous quality nevertheless masks pointed commentary on the state of the country in the late 1960s.
Rogério Sganzerla’s debut feature film literally announces its playfulness and divergence from Cinema novo with an opening sequence of multiple layers of text and sounds…
After the opening sequence is a scene of youths playing in a field in the slums. The assumed titular character continues his voiceover, stating his origins in the slums, and finally appears climbing over a wall and forcing the lock of a house. He is, indeed, the red light bandit and kills and/or rapes indiscriminately the owners of the houses into which he steals. Apart from breaking into houses and taking money (and sometimes forcing someone to cook him a meal), ‘Light’ (Paulo Villaça) is also a Don Juan, listing off the women he has had—although one of them, Janete Jane (Helena Ignez) turns out to be as clever and unscrupulous as him. At times, he squeezes in an extracurricular activity, such as going to the cinema and watching through binoculars while eating corn. In his wake, he leaves a body count that the provocatively named Detective Sade follows in the hopes of catching him and stopping his reign of terror. Nothing fazes Light, however, and he is not afraid of dying. In fact, he even courts death. In this regard, he is a swinging sixties western bandit (‘Masked Zorro of the poor’), but also an existential cynic.
On the one hand, Light is based on a real-life criminal (though not to be confused with American Caryl Chessman who had the same nickname of the ‘red light bandit’). On the other hand, Light is less a character than a mélange of ideas and attitudes that contribute to the film’s ongoing wry self-reflexive commentary on itself and the time period. This notion is encapsulated by one of Light’s repeated phrases, ‘When you can’t do anything, you mock,’ uttered once directly to the camera, supported by his hedonistic lifestyle and devil-may-care attitude. Light is actually one among many sources of asides that generate a self-deprecating tone and mock Brazil. For instance, while Detective Sade is in a nightclub and inspecting the scene, a man asks him for a cigarette. Sade brushes him off, and the man mutters under his breath, ‘Lack of socialism. That’s why Brazil won’t evolve.’
The two overlapping voiceovers (provided with gusto by Hélio de Aguilar and Mara Duval), in particular, puncture the soundtrack, disrupt sound-image relations, and dish out cold, hard mocking comments on Brazil. At times, they commentate in a cheeky fashion on events and situations as they unfold on the screen. At other times, they spout one-liner headlines, sometimes as the bandit is in the middle of the most mundane act: ‘A Brazilian in the last phase of capitalism’ or ‘Young underdeveloped criminal,’ poking fun at and utilising for its ends Cinema novo, its stance of subdesenvolvimento (‘underdevelopment’), and third world/postcolonial politics of the nation and national identity. At still other times, they speak of Brazil caught in a state of agitation, where men die at their own doorsteps, and terrorism gripping the country, ‘We don’t want a Vietnam in Brazil,’ betraying the intense political climate of the day. Taking together Light, the voiceovers, and the erratic plot, the film spares no one: media, state officials, businessmen, and the people (distracted by ball-shaped flying objects), represented as internally corrupt and/or misguided. These corrupt and/or misguided parties coalesce in J.B. Da Silva, a political figure who arrives in Brazil halfway into the film and is no better than Light.
… the film unfolds like one of Oswald de Andrade’s 1920s modernist manifestos: jerky, exclamatory, absurdist, and emphatic.
The film does not hide its influences either, including one of Sganzerla’s heroes, Orson Welles. The continually overlapping audio layers; concentrated visual details; frequency of low-angle shots; seamy world and characters certainly recall a combination of Mr. Arkadin (1955) and Touch of Evil (1959). The film’s collage-like nature also betrays Tropicalismo’s preference for not only collage but also pastiche and its own interpretation of Andrade’s cultural anthropophagy. As Ismail Xavier writes in Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema (1997), Tropicalismo ‘introduced the shock of constructions and collages inspired by the Anglo-American pop art from the 1950s and 1960s’ (7). Exaggerated angles, the voiceovers’ vocal delivery as if reading out the ‘bam!’ or ‘pow!’ in comic books, scattered and rapid-fire cuts and jumps in scenes, the film unfolds like one of Oswald de Andrade’s 1920s modernist manifestos: jerky, exclamatory, absurdist, and emphatic.
Hallucinatory and racing in its pace, bridging low and high culture, O bandido da luz vermelha is indeed Sganzerla’s own manifesto, a sentimental cinematic education of cinema and society in the most brazen and delirious way.
Hallucinatory and racing in its pace, bridging low and high culture, O bandido da luz vermelha is indeed Sganzerla’s own manifesto, a sentimental cinematic education of cinema and society in the most brazen and delirious way.
