Apparently, the new arthouse flex is dropping your opening credits half an hour or more into the film, as in Drive My Car, Long Day’s Journey Into Night – and now Aly Muritiba’s desolate and sophisticated Brazilian romantic quest Private Desert. Here, it’s all the better to accentuate the barren terrain from which it emerges. Brawny police instructor Daniel (Bacurau’s Antonio Saboia) is suspended for attacking a recruit and forced to take on punishing night shifts as a security guard. At home he battles to convince his sister to do her fair share of caring for their dementia-stricken father, also a former policeman. Daniel’s only succour is the WhatsApp-based relationship he has with Sara, a woman somewhere in Brazil’s north. Then she starts ghosting him.
Prologue done, Daniel snaps and hits the road in search of his Awol paramour. He flyposts the area near the inland city of Petrolina with shots of Sara. But when they finally cross paths under nightclub lights, she turns out not to be who she says. There is a change of styles from the intro’s sepulchral tableaus to something more loose and fluid, and Muritiba excels at infusing his drama with subtle state-of-the-nation resonance. There seem to be two Brazils, circling but constantly misunderstanding one another. Daniel – making jokes as his father puts his “pistol” away as he washes him – is in hock to sclerotic macho ideals. But are things any less unhappy elsewhere? The people around Sara – like Fernando (Thomas Aquino), the protective friend who screens Daniel – spin out exploitative fantasies but remain dependent on and defined by those whom they feed off.
The romantic tussle rests on two astute performances. Saboia allows a kind of bug-eyed unease to dominate Daniel, despite his attempts at dick pic-taking insouciance. And, as his opposite number, Pedro Fasanaro cycles through disaffection, self-infatuation and an earnest search for self which is as urgent as the smitten copper’s. Perhaps there is something a bit too demonstrative about the eventual resolution, wrapped with the bow of the Bonnie Tyler belter Total Eclipse of the Heart. But Private Desert winds up somewhere surprisingly gentle.
• Private Desert is available on digital platforms on 24 April
