Crux at a Carnival

The Given Word, the major achievement to date of Brazil's germinal cinema novo, sets forth the tragedy of a simple, devout man who batters out his life against an implacable apparatus of religious and secular authority.

In poverty-stricken Northeastern Brazil, a peasant named Ze, honoring the saint who spared the life of his injured donkey, carries a cross "as heavy as Christ's" 30 miles to the Church of Santa Barbara in Bahia. In the city, Ze's wife Rosa is seduced by a sneering pimp. Next morning a vindictive priest refuses to let Ze enter the church, scorning his promise to the saint as a pagan vow made through an intermediary god at a macumba ceremony. "Black magic," cries the priest. Ze shakes his head sadly. "My church has no image of Santa Barbara." He is a Catholic, what else matters? The subtle dangers of syncretism are beyond him. He will wait.

As the peasant settles down on the padre's church steps, the city throbs to carnival tempo. It is a feast day. Some newsmen hear of Ze's plight and exploit him in headlines as a Communist agitator, a heretic, a miracle worker; then the pimp instigates a riot that ends in Ze's death. Here, the usual Christ symbolism is seized upon, but Director Anselmo Duarte brings it off feelingly as the sullen, silent crowd carries the dead man in to fulfill his promise.

Strikingly photographed, the film, taken from a Rio stage success, reveals its origin in occasional talkiness and the stagy pace of comings and goings. Its anticlerical theme seems partly inadvertent, for the characters show little shading: if the priest is merely obdurate, Ze is fanatic. The Given Word's strength lies in the vitality that pulses through an astringent morality play, filling it with the cries of pitchmen and voodoo women and street-corner poets, the hip-heaving dancers and gourd-rattling hipsters who almost make humanity look worth dying for.

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