Word: antonios
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...children advance toward one another behind red and yellow shields, throwing what appear to be rubber balls. There is no sound, only a slow camera movement inward until several children are revealed lying dead and bloodied on the ground. Then abruptly and without comment, the scene cuts to Antonio staring blankly into space. At another point, Antonio wanders into his son's room, asking the way out of the house. On the wall are Paul McCartney and Easy Rider posters; next to the bed is a record player. The son, thus stereotyped, immediately assumes the role of the father, berating...
...Antonio Coco, a wealthy Spanish industrialist, is in a car accident that leaves him paralvzed and amnesiac. While he sits immobile in a wheelchair, prey to guilt-ridden hallucinations, his estate and manufacturing company fall into hopeless disarray. Decisions are left unmade, allowances stop, family discipline falls apart and, worse, a Swiss bank account number is lost. The process of the film becomes an attempt on the part of his family, mistress, and attendants, to shock Antonio back into health by acting out various psychological traumas of his past (a punishment in which he is locked in his room with...
...psychological study, a detective story, or a lover's confrontation. But his aim is merely to tease the possibilities of all three, just enough to provide a context for his real interest which is to create a parable of the decay of capitalist consciousness. The hallucinating mind of Antonio comes to represent a political system deprived of coherence, left only to a bombast of images of its growth, crimes, guilts and fears. The plot is a contrivance to make feasible the various fantasies and surreal dramas that provide the core of Saura's parable, far more important than the narrative...
...movement of the film depends on the reflexive nature of Antonio's situation. He is at once the original perpetrator of all the confusion acted out on screen and at the same time a passive halfwit naively fearful of that confusion. Amnesiac Antonio has no desire to assume once again the position of capitalist tycoon Antonio. And this duality allows Saura a means of criticism from the inside...
Rocha treats these conflicts between elites and masses in two other films about primitive religion in the impoverished northeast of Brazil, Black God. White Devil (1964) and Antonio das Mortes (1969) where the people are actually killed off during the fighting between the elite revolutionary cangaceiros and the beatos, the hired killers of the landowning aristocracy. Rocha deals with Warrior Saints and Dragons of Evil, cut off from the masses by their self-consciousness as legend and their mystical level of existence. Sebastiao, for instance, the revolutionary "Black God," seeks to "revenge the death of Christ with the blood...