
A wonderful, sad, magic brazilian semi-documentary film… an unforgettable masterpiece!
"IRACEMA can be described as an interpretative or fictional documentary. In it, a small cast of non-professional (with one exception) actors improvise the action against a background of real people in real situations, filmed in direct cinema style.
Iracema, a 15-year-old Amazonian of pure Indian blood, deserts her family's boat and subsistence existence for the glittering baubles of Belem on festival day. She is picked up by Tiao Brasil Grande, who takes her with him on a run to haul virgin timber from the interior … On the return trip he dumps her at a raunchy all-night bar. (There) she is taken advantage of, deceived, abused. Her most violent abduction, significantly, is at the hands of a group of soldiers. The film refrains from voyeurism and titillation by focusing on the prelude and the results rather than on the actual experience of her degradation. Interconnected sequences of stripping and burning entire forests, of highway construction, of selling indentured workers wholesale, put Iracema's (an anagram of America) experience in a larger perspective without belaboring the point.
As the film ends, Tiao Brasil Grande runs into Iracema once again. He fails to recognize her, poorly dressed now, missing a tooth, and in the company of derelict and drunken prostitutes. He rejects her approach and then refuses her request for five cruceros. In the last shot, his new red truck vanishes down the dirt road, leaving Iracema behind, broke and stranded. "Filho de puta", she yells after him, her only revenge a self-deprecating insult.
The parallels between the colony and metropolis relation and that of the dominant male and dependent female are well taken. Tiao moves on once Iracema has been exhausted, just as the neo-colonialists freely abandon exploited territory for the virgin region further on. Tiao is always in the driver's seat; he calls the shots and Iracema goes along for the ride, convinced that she is finally going somewhere when in fact she is only being taken to her own destruction."