Orgy

Celebrated novelist Trevisan’s sole feature is a radical, plotless re-envisioning/critique of Cinema Novo, recounting the journey of a deranged youth who killed his father.

The sole film by celebrated novelist João Silvério Trevisan is an anarchic repudiation of the Cinema Novo, a cannibalisation of mainstream cultural tendencies, clichéd tropicalist ideas and worn-out Brazilian literary myths about the sertão (the backwoods), all in one highly irreverent package that infuriated censors (it was immediately banned) and left intellectuals exasperated trying to find the tools to describe it.

Ostensibly about a group of allegorical creations that slowly come together in search of a country, the film expresses the alternating sense of euphoria (economic miracle! football glories!) and fear (secret police squads! media control!) that dominated Brazil at the end of the 1960s.

Orgy may have been designed as a provocation, and the immediate rupture that it provoked is a testament to that, but it’s also a seductively crafted piece of sculptural cinema, inventing unprecedented moments of sensuality even as it attempts to destroy everything else in its path. –IFFR