Neighboring Sounds

Mendonça’s first long feature shows his great potential as a director. Neighboring Songs revel it self as beautiful film filled with astonishing images, a powerful song editing, and its go deeply in the life of the Middle Class Recife people showing the extremes of the life in that city. Its violence, the contrasts of the socioeconomic classes, the consume of drugs by the matron, the dominium of the olds traditional rich family’s on the local microcosmic society and the decadency of this micro empire, the noises of the constructions of edifices. The film advances in a slow way, pleasuring the eye with the reality impressed on the film. Mendonça’s ear and lenses point’s on the only place possible to make this film in Recife - their own apartment and street. The film it’s Recife, it’s the Brazil, the realism, the sounds, the noises, the heated fights of the neighboring, the middle class, and the lower class – I see the Brazil contrasts every day in all its extensions.

"O som ao redor" had everything to be a fine film, daring propouse and a trivial context to create empathy with viewers, but watching it, sometimes gives us an impression that's some disperse parts of movie are sewed one in another, some parts are almost genials, anothers without consistence, in another words, film variates between ambitoius and pretensious.