Crime Scene is a monthly Vague Visages column about the relationship between crime cinema and movie locations. VV’s Case of the Naves Brothers essay contains spoilers. Luiz Sérgio Person’s 1967 film features Anselmo Duarte, Raul Cortez and Juca de Oliveira. Check out movie reviews, along with cast/character articles, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings, at the home page.

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There are multiple Brazils in the cinematic imagination. Perhaps the most common image (or at least the one most visible in the USA) is the stereotypical idea of a sun-kissed tropical paradise whose Edenic qualities are mitigated by the presence of poverty and drug warfare — the kind that animates Fernando Meirelles’ City of God (2002) or José Padilha’s Elite Squad (2007) and its sequel, Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within (2010). All of the aforementioned films are based in Rio de Janeiro, a cosmopolitan mega-city with an international reputation (unearned) as the country’s cultural capital.

But there is another Brazil that is more cinematically interesting, one that sprawls out into the inland mass and stretches out into eternity, occupying a similar position in the country’s psyche as the American West does for the USA. There is a semi-desert in Brazil, a region called the Sertão, located in the interior of the northeast region. It provides its own set of myths and narratives, including a history of banditry by the Cangaceiros, the most famous of which was Lampião. The Brazilian film industry never quite generated a sustained troop of Cangaço Westerns, but they do crop up, most visibly in Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’ Bacurau (2019) and Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1966), perhaps the greatest Brazilian film of all time. The Sertão — with its persistent droughts, rugged terrain and economic depression — occupies a psychological space in the Brazilian imagination that goes beyond the geographic limitations of Sertão itself, like a slowly encroaching desert that comes to occupy the entirety of inland Brazil. One could call it the Sertão mentality. Beyond the tourist imagery of the coast is a vast sprawling universe, seemingly populated exclusively by farmers and small freight towns, whose existence seems to depend on passing traffic.

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This Brazil is the one which the country’s Cinema Novo movement (from the sixties) often took to its magnifying glass. Black God, White Devil was shot deep in the Sertão of Bahia state. Man Marked for Death, Twenty Years Later by Eduard Coutinho (started in 1964, finished in 1984)  was also shot in Sertão of Paraiba state. In many of these films, and more broadly in Brazilian 20th-century history, there’s a clear tension between landowning elites and the largely rural manual laborers who built the financial backbone of the country’s agricultural exports.

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Case of the Naves Brothers, the subject of this month’s Crime Scene column, is not set in the northeast nor in the Sertão, but it does reflect a certain Sertão mentality. It’s a film whose dramatic tensions are animated by the divide between the civilized and uncivilized, between the outlaw country (or the perception of it) and the physical presence of law and order. Case of the Naves Brothers is set in Araguary (or Araguari), a small city in the central state of Minas Gerais. The film, shot in 1967 during the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship, is a retelling of the titular case, which occurred in 1937 in Brazil’s previous coup d’etat, led by Getúlio Vargas. The Brazilian military junta of the time disappeared its political enemies and exiled many more, so openly making a film directly critical of the military dictatorship (even if it was the “previous” dictatorship) was a ballsy move.

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Two brothers, Sebastião and Joaquim (Juca de Oliveira and Raul Cortez, respectively), address accusations of killing their cousin Benedito, who had recently disappeared with a loan of 90m Brazilian reais for their farm. But the cousin’s body is nowhere to be found, and neither is the money. An army commissioner (Anselmo Duarte) is placed in charge of the investigation — convinced of the presence of a crime, he takes it upon himself to torture and brutalize anyone he suspects of being tied to the disappearance, eventually extracting false confessions from both brothers.

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Case of the Naves Brothers is a story of state brutality and violence. Director Luiz Sérgio Person films the story dry and matter-of-factly, much of it on location in Araguary and utilizing non-professional residents who would surely have been familiar with the case. And yet despite the practical storytelling style (feigning objectivity), Case of the Naves Brothers is far from a precursor to the true crime genre so popular today. There is something deadeningly bureaucratic about Person’s directorial choices, which serves to heighten these links between apparatchiks and state violence. After all, the opening credits include images of film burning through, as if the central brutality is strong enough to slice through the very technology which supposedly captures objective reality.

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The early part of Case of the Naves Brothers establishes the importance of Araguary to the case. It is a largely agrarian town, with business leaders shown muttering about the new “authoritarian democracy” that has just been installed (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one). Their concerns are not about freedom of speech but about the price of coffee exports. Locals complain about the lack of law and order, opening a space for military and state forces to establish themselves as the said figures of law and order, regardless of what justifications they use to establish that authority.

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When the army commissioner enters the town, he begins to dominate the picture, sucking in energy like a black hole. First, Person inserts split-second images of the torture of the brothers (in one of the few impressionistic aesthetic touches), but the mask gradually falls. As the commissioner dominates the direction of the investigation (and the contours of the town’s politics), so too are his methods more clearly depicted via ever-more increasingly violent torture methods and ever-more aggressive policing. It’s evident that he sees the town as a place to be tamed, a place he believes is filled with bandits and needs to be civilized, like a John Wayne of Brazil arriving in, yes, the Sertão of his imagination. 

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And yet, Araguary is not in the Sertão. It is not the lawless hinterlands of the imagination, but rather a modern town in which people live and work. The “state” has long since arrived with its symbols of modernity: there are train stations, banks and law courts which will fight the case for and against the Naves brothers. But the army officer dominates — he’s a military man to the end, a mini-Bolsonaro, his weight suffocating the land: it is not “modern” enough for him, and the only way to drag it there is through violence. João Alamy Filho (John Hubert), the defense lawyer who took the case (and whose book was adapted for the film), acts as the audience surrogate and the voice of conscience. But even he is initially skeptical about the brothers’ innocence, immediately assuming that their arrests were for good reason: inherent trust in authority figures is difficult to shake.

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Against the commissioner, the Naves brothers disappear in the picture. Yes, they are there, with speaking lines given to the actors, but in a sense they become anonymized through state brutality: their status as victims of an overpowering apparatus ensures they’re not given the agency to impose their own narrative. There is a similarity between Case of the Naves Brothers and Francesco Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano (1962), a film which also anonymizes its titular character and features the popular image of bandits in the countryside infecting and motivating the response of a deadly, financially-motivated state apparatus — another movie shot on location with non-professionals with first-hand knowledge of the events depicted.

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Case of the Naves Brothers informs viewers that the titular subjects were actually acquitted of murder at first in Araguary, and that the state later appealed and lost again. A third appeal took the case up to the state courts, housed in Minas Gerais’ capital, Belo Horizonte. Person transitions to an imposing and classical building, exuding power and strength. The third trial convicted the Naves brothers. It was only years later, long after the siblings had been released, that cousin Benedito reappeared and filled newspaper columns with a shocking story of injustice. But it was too little, too late.

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Much of this column has discussed the lives of low-down criminals in the genre film world, a gallery of losers who inevitably meet the long arm of the law. It is a cliche to compare cops and robbers as two sides of the same coin, but essentially that is what they are — it’s just that the cops have the power of the state behind them. And sometimes, all it takes is the idea of a place being lawless — a small town like Araguary, far enough from questioning eyes that might come from skeptical journalists, investigators or simply a critical mass of civilians — to justify abuses of power. Case of the Naves Brothers is hardly in the annals of great Brazilian cinema, like the works of Rocha, but it absolutely deserves to be seen in the same breath.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

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