Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!
I grew up in the church. It was a liberal church, to be sure, but still in the church. I have long since given up religion as well as religious belief. It’s my position that religion, as a rule, makes things worse, a notion probably put into my head by the title of a Christopher Hitchens book, but one that I stand by. I’m in mind of Hitchens as I look at Medusa, a recent film out of Brazil. This is a film that is clearly referencing Jair Bolsonaro in a lot of respects, at least in terms of its approach to the effects of extreme belief.
Hitchens tells an anecdote of an interview with right-wing whackaloon Dennis Prager where Prager asks him if he were in a foreign city and was approached by a group of young men, would he be more or less nervous if he knew they had just come from a prayer meeting. Hitchens responds by saying that, staying only with the letter B, he’s had that experience in Baghdad, Belgrade, Bosnia, Bombay, and Belfast, and if you were ever in any of those cities and you saw men leaving a prayer meeting, you knew exactly how fast you had to run in the other direction. Thanks to Medusa, we can add Brazil to the list.
Medusa introduces us to Mari (Mari Oliveira), who is part of a group of young women. By day, they are sort of a worship team who perform songs for a very fire-and-brimstone preacher (Thiago Fragoso). At night, they roam the city wearing blank white masks, looking for women they believe to be morally corrupted. They then chase the women down and beat them into submission until they confess their sins and agree to turn their lives over to Christ. These confessions are filmed and uploaded to YouTube as a sort of confirmation of their “good work.”
In one such event, the girl being chased fights back and manages to cut Mari across her face, scarring her badly. This causes some significant changes in Mari’s life. The scar causes her to lose her job with a plastic surgeon, since, essentially, it looks bad for the help to be scarred in this way. She starts working in a coma ward, searching for the woman she and her friends see as an inspiration. According to their legend, she was badly disfigured, and could possibly be in the coma ward that Mari is working in.
But the attack has caused something of a change in Mari, awakening something in her that conflicts with her religious views. Feeling rejected because of her scar, particularly by the militant young men involved in the church, Mari starts to explore her own sexuality and this seems to cause her to question other aspects of her own reality.
While the young women attached to the church are singing praise songs and hunting down women they think need to be reined in, it’s the men in the church who are far more dangerous and would be who Hitchens was talking about above. Mari and her friend Michelle (Lara Tremouroux) wind up at a rave that is violently broken up by the boys.
Medusa is a film that really wants to say something about the nature of this kind of extreme belief and the dangers of religious fanaticism. It is, in fact saying this, but it doesn’t really say it as clearly as it should. I have to wonder, since this did come out during the Bolsanaro regime in Brazil, if director Anita Rocha da Silveria felt potentially unsafe going directly after people who were supporters of his government. But this is a real weakness in the film. It gets us in the direction of what it wants to say, but it doesn’t really say everything it needs to to drive home the message it’s really offering.
This might be da Silveria’s lack of experience as a filmmaker. Medusa is only her second feature film, and this may be growing pains in that respect. This shows a great deal of promise, and I hope she continues to make films along these lines, because that promise is there.
And, personally, I think we need more movies that look into this as a topic. I’m not exaggerating when I say that my view on religion is that it’s the cause or exacerbator of every social ill that we experience in society. Films that explore those dangers are necessary.
Why to watch Medusa: Religion is a danger.
Why not to watch: It seems to take a long time to get somewhere.