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SALT KISS SHORT SHOT
By Claiborne Smith
The litany of adjectives that describe the protagonist of Fellipe Gamarano Barbosa’s Salt Kiss is not the kind that usually accompany the term “leading man.” Rogério is selfish, peevish, manipulative, jealous, passive-aggressive, and chauvinistic; he is a total and unmitigated cad. It is actually startling to watch him become more and more of an oaf as Barbosa’s finely-tuned and observant 18-minute drama unfolds.
As Rogério’s friends gather at his sprawling, Brazilian island home to celebrate the New Year, the languid and rakish setting unleashes Rogério’s deep unease with his old friend Paolo, whose fiancée Luma is on the island for the first time to meet Rogério and the rest of their friends. “You must be the woman he loves,” Rogério says to Luma upon meeting her. “You know I’ll have to love you too,” he says, smarmily.
A well-heeled cad relaxing with his friends on an island is not the stuff that recent Brazilian cinema has bothered with. Thanks to the financial incentives from the government, Brazilian filmmakers have offered up a wealth of rich investigations into the problems that plague Brazilians – Bus 174 and Favela Rising, both documentaries about people in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, come to mind – but the rest of Brazilian life has been largely untreated.
This is the gaping hole that the 26-year-old Barbosa, who made Salt Kiss as his thesis film at Columbia University’s M.F.A. film program, intends to fill. “Our cinema, since it’s largely funded by the state, has some kind of commitment to being relevant, to being something that matters nationally,” Barbosa said. “It’s almost like an obligation for our filmmakers.” But on an island, Barbosa’s characters “have nothing to worry about” he pointed out, “so maybe we can talk about some things we don’t normally talk about in Brazilian cinema.”
Like talking about what happens to an old friendship when one of the friends grows up and becomes responsible while the other one resents those changes and refuses to grow with him. The trick, of course, is to make the audience sympathize with someone like Rogério. “He has an incredible magnetism,” Barbosa said about Rogério. “I think it’s always redeeming when someone is able to make someone laugh, to create gatherings around him out of his presence. The flip side to that is that when he doesn’t get the laugh, he loses control and that moment is the moment the film talks about.”
SALT KISS is Barbosa’s second short (Un Muerta Es Pequeña screened at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival). It did not have an easy reception in Brazil. “We’re not really used to dealing with the upper class in our film sin Brazil,” Barbosa said. He began to think that “maybe the film wasn’t made for Brazil,” although it has won several awards at various film festivals, including one in Portugal. But Barbosa has staked his own claim: he is out to create nothing less than “a fresh cinema that doesn’t have commitments or obligations to any particular kind of film.”
