THE EIGHTH COLOR OF THE RAINBOW (Amauri Tangará, 2004)

A lovely, moving film, if a bit repetitious early on, A Oitava Cor do Arco-Íris, from Brazil, centers on 11-year-old Joãozinho (Diego Borges, in one of cinema’s great child performances), who has been raised by his grandmother in a rural village. (Joãozinho’s mother has abandoned him and is likely working in the city as a prostitute.) Grandma Didinha, impoverished and ill, can’t afford medicine to relieve her pain. Joãozinho hopes to raise the necessary money by selling Mocinha, Grandma’s goat. Amauri Tangará’s film finds the hopeful, perseverant boy eventually making his way to Cuiabá, the nearest city, in order to make the sale. At a public market he recoils at the idea that Mocinha should become dinner meat, and later that day delinquent boys steal Mocinha; but the two are reunited. Meanwhile, bedridden Didinha herself is roused and attempts to find her missing grandson.
     The film opens with a brusque rush of reality: Joãozinho is discovered and tossed out of the back of the truck, along with his goat, by a villager as he attempts to steal a ride. This is followed by what appears to be a dream-shot: in slow motion, Joãozinho, accompanied by Mocinha, walking down a street, eyeing uneasily the crowd of people gathering behind him. At the end of his unsuccessful day’s journey, the film bends around to the beginning, only Joãozinho dreams that the truck driver treats him with kindness before the reality of the driver’s meanness kicks in, and we realize that the shot on the street occurs as Joãozinho walks home, that the villagers behind him are not following him but heading to Grandma’s hut, with tears and flowers.
     Earlier, playing with Mocinha, the boy had dreamt of flying; a merciful Tangará now leads us to a happy ending but for the serious poverty that there’s no getting around.
     A man had agreed to buy the goat if Joãozinho could guess the number of colors in the rainbow. “Eight.” “No,” the man laughed, “seven.” Joãozinho: “My grandmother told me there are eight but some people can’t see the eighth color.”
     The eighth color of the rainbow, perhaps, is God’s love.

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BONNIE AND CLYDE (Arthur Penn, 1967)

Producer Warren Beatty’s ambition for an association with the nouvelle vague led him to submit the screenplay for Bonnie and Clyde, by Robert Benton and David Newman, to Godard and Truffaut, each of whom in turn declined to direct. Leslie Caron, Beatty’s sexual partner at the time, had urged the project forward on the presumption that she would be Bonnie Parker to Beatty’s Clyde Barrow. Arthur Penn ended up directing the blood-splattered slapstick comedy about Depression-era bank robbers. Brilliantly edited by Dede Allen, the result leaned heavily on American landscapes whipping past automobile windows like fast, dying breaths. Following the French lead, the film kept on the move, much of its principal action playing out in cars.
     Coincidentally, the best Bonnie-&-Clyde film would come from France: Manuel Pradal’s Marie Baie des Anges (1997). Sentimentalized and romanticized, Penn’s version is monotonous, tedious and shallow. Outbursts of violence, whether directed by the Barrow gang or against the gang by authorities, pump up the flatness, break up the tedium like a Texas gusher.
     The acting is superficial. Mabel Cavitt is briefly heartrending, however, as Parker’s mom, and Faye Dunaway makes Bonnie’s body expressively limber.
     Is there a point to this film? Yes—and the persistent theme is not wanton pursuit of excitement. Rather, it is the craving by anonymous, voiceless American souls for a sense of importance, a voice that’s “heard.”* Courting media attention (hence their crimes, staged photographs, Bonnie’s doggerel “Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde”), Bonnie and Clyde want to believe they matter. It is the point of the film’s best shot: Bonnie, in a movie theater, watching Ginger Rogers and, although Dunaway elsewhere looks nothing like Rogers, looking eerily like her here as Bonnie dreams herself into the gigantic-screen Rogers and dreams Rogers into herself.

* Next stop: an astute presidential candidate’s courting of “the silent majority.”

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