Killed the Family and Went to the Movies

This film caused controversy in 1969, not just for its content, but above all for its daring and sparse approach to that content. Today, it is regarded as a classic of Brazilian cinema. The title of the film was inspired by the headlines of the 'gutter' or yellow press. Right from the start the title is literal: a young, lower middle class man kills his father and mother and goes to the movies... to see Lost in Love. From then on the film-within-a-film takes over. Fiction and fact blend into each other and it is no longer clear on what level of 'reality' - or of the imaginary - we are existing. The film gets rid of the usual parameters of representation and the stories overflow their boundaries, that usually circumscribe action. In Lost in Love two upper-middle-class girls hide away in a mansion in the hills. But there is also an affair between two poor girls, there are two tormented young men of different social standing, there are references to the political context of the time. To make matters more uncertain, the same actors play different characters. The actions of social violence correspond to acts of violence against the syntax of the film itself: the discontinued and fragmented development, the daring ellipses, the juxtaposition of disconnected elements, the rupture of the sound space. Bressane works on his dialectics of discomfort. Projected onto the screen is a true 'impression of reality' and a 'suspension of disbelief' in the cinema.(IFFR)