Good Manners/ As Boas Manieras (2017)
An über stylish queer Brazilian werewolf horror.
Pic is still from film Good Manners.
As we are nearing Halloween, I attempted to collate a list of non-English, non-western queer horrors and predictably it wasn’t the easiest of tasks. However Brazilian dark horror fantasy Good Manners (As Boas Maneiras in Portuguese) jumped straight at me. Written and directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, starring Isabél Zuaa and Marjorie Estiano, it was released in 2017 to great acclaim.
The queer credentials of Good Manners lie solely in the first part of the film, with the interracial relationship between the wealthy 5-month-pregnant Ana (Estiano) and her nanny/ live-in housekeeper Clara (Zuaa). With each full moon as Ana’s werewolf foetus gestating inside achingly yearns for blood, her own carnal same-sex urges emerge. Clara’s duties in return expand to encompass carer, lover, companion and feeder. Yet the proceeding sequence of events has the film veer off into a completely different direction midway, where queer relationship is abruptly abandoned to make space for a mother-creature one. Ultimately this new family unit is also a queer one, which has nothing to do with men or straight people or conventional reproduction.
Writings about the film point to Ana and Clara’s unequal relationship echoing Brazil’s longstanding history of inequality, discrimination and white people’ co-opting of black lives and bodies which is at logger-heads with the couple’s increasing romantic entanglement. And their doomed relationship borrows its cues from narrative of many lesbian relationships seen in sub-genre of horrors of the 1970s with films like Daughters of Darkness and the works of directors like Jean Rollin and Jesús Franco. Films created through the perspective of a male gaze, where lesbian depictions were highly sexualised and often demonised.
The otherworldly element in Good Manners is meditative, tastefully crafted and aesthetically understated, allowing the viewer to envision how the life of a werewolf could play out in everyday life. Rojas and Dutra have stated that the magical setting of films like I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Night of the Demon (1957) by filmmaker Jacque Tourner, were an inspiration, contributing to the slightly dreamy, “studio version’ depiction of Sao Paulo portrayed in the film. Their investigations into werewolf folklore of different cultures across the globe, revealed how the myth usually relates to impulses of violence and sex in the context of religious and conservative values. Perhaps reflective of people's fear of queerness disrupting the status quo, loosening the grip of pervasive heteronormative standards.
Good Manners is available to watch on Mubi.