FrightFest review – A Própria Carne (The Flesh Itself)
An opening caption fills in the background of the War of the Triple Alliance in 1870, when three nations ganged up to ravage Paraguay … but the plot of this Brazilian picture could easily fit the American Civil War of The Beguiled or Ambrose Bierce’s battle-adjacent horrors or the samurai era of Yojimbo.
Three soldiers Gustavo (Jorge Guerreiro), Anselmo (George Sauma), Gabriel (Pierri Baitelli) – flee in to the jungle, reasoning that their choices are either definitely be killed in the war or probably be executed for running away from the war, and murder a colonel (Camillo Borges) who happens on them while out for a walk. Then they come to a house in the middle of nowhere to find an ancient hunchback (Luis Carlos Persy) and a very quiet young woman (Jade Mascarenhas) offering hospitality on the condition they be chained into their room at night and that the host always has his rifle handy. The deserters have to come up with convoluted explanations for how Gabriel got shot and why the two white guys are so concerned about a black guy they say is a slave and invent a story of being robbed in the woods. The hunchback just won’t let it drop, continually pointing out holes in their yarn (like the lack of a bloody bullet hole in the civilian trousers Gabriel has changed into while ditching his uniform but after he’s been shot) and dropping dark hints about exactly why he’s so hung up on chains and locks. A ‘homem estranho’ (Eber Inacio) is also a guest at the house, silently gurning, and the atmos suggests this isn’t just going to be a nasty story of scavenging around a war with some Keep-like suggestions of what the chains are for.
Director Ian SBF – who co-wrote with Deive Pazos and Alexandre Ottoni – gets bogged down in the middle of the film, just as the trio of deserters get stuck in a house they obviously ought to run miles from … with the characters just doing their acts once they’ve been established and some of the ominousness tipping over and turning comical even before we get into some quasi-torture porn business. To escape a tabletop head-vice, Gabriel has to squeeze blood from his own severed foot to serve as a lubricant. In Martyrs type films, there was a nasty edge about woman being the subject of torture for philosophical reasons which would be hard to grasp while you were being skinned – here, the black/slave character, who already has whip-marks on his back, is the one subjected to the most extreme treatment, with the same slightly iffy justification that caricaturing a historical/societal injustice isn’t the same as endorsing it even if there is a degree of fetishism. A Própria Carne is powerful in fits and starts, but trudges somewhat – it’s glum and grim to the point of absurdity, though points for an understated bit of Lovecraftiana in the finale and rooting the drama in an underfilmed bit of history.
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