O riso e a faca

As hyperbolic as it may sound, a large portion of film history has been built around and through white men who saw no problem in venturing into places they were not entitled to. Beginning with early camera operators who travelled around the world to bring their fellow white men exotic images of distant and unknown cultures, the insolence of white men – their curiosity, whether ill-intended or good-hearted, making little difference – set heaps of films in motion, just as it shaped the history of cinema. Even today, within the context of a far more conspicuous post-colonialism, their case can’t seem to be helped: they keep prying, probing, trespassing – and, euphemistically at their best, “exploring” – which ultimately leads to a futile condition best described as an oversaturated cinematic imagination built on the remnants of colonialism. When a white man pulls the narrative strings of a film, our trained gazes already know where to look, which paths he can take, which relations he could engage in. The set of rules won’t change – he might not be aware of it, and good for him if he is – but we’re as entrapped in this condition as he is.

How do we then, as audiences but also as storytellers and image-makers, deal with this structural deadlock? Should one stop telling stories altogether? Why bother watching films if the political and symbolic outcomes are known beforehand? To all these questions – which a single film, on its own, obviously cannot answer – Pedro Pinho’s O Riso e a Faca remains curiously indifferent; not because it doesn’t care about their implications from a creative standpoint, but because it makes its case by asking different questions instead.

Despite its ambitious length of three hours and thirty minutes, the Portuguese filmmaker builds the narrative economy of his film around a rather straightforward premise: an environmental engineer named Sérgio is sent to Guinea-Bissau to conduct an assessment of the potential impacts of the construction of a new road on the local population. But from the very start of the film, his fish-out-of-waterness comes across as playfully, and somewhat ironically, heightened. His car breaks down on the road; the hotel staff changes his room without even asking him – the heat and the noise of his neighbours making everything even worse. About Sergio, we won’t learn much over the course of the film – but what Pinho insists on emphasizing throughout will be his inability to fit in, as the filmmaker will go on to observe at length how his ill-fitting persona and bodily presence will continue to flounder and stumble across rice fields, remote villages, and local nightclubs. Yet the filmmaker makes sure that Sérgio’s character is never reduced to a mere stereotypical discursive vessel for “white men” as a socio-political category – the fact that he and his image are indissociable from this category is never a problem, since what really interests the film are the frictions and fissures he, voluntarily or involuntarily, creates through his interactions. Within the framework of his job, we see him asking questions to the local community about the climate, the harvest, and their means of living; spending time with kids, wandering, dozing off. Those extensive sequences, which border on documentary form – but which, from interviews Pinho has given, we learn are in fact all scripted – reveal a self-effacing friendliness that paradoxically makes him look even more incongruous, much to his disadvantage. He is the elephant in the room, and acknowledging who he is and what he represents does not really change the way others perceive him.

Although these segments take up a substantial part of the film, Sérgio appears more vulnerable, well-rounded, and real through his relationships with Diara and Gui, two inhabitants who also take a peculiar interest in him, and onto whom Sérgio does not shy away from projecting his desires – to be with them, and even to be like them. Yet carnal impulses are never meant to be expressed as pure, boundless, or equal; in Sérgio’s case, they are embedded within sexual, political, economic, and moral power dynamics. The push-and-pull in their relationship, prompted mostly by Diara, hinders his good-hearted yet unavoidably assertive intention to get to know them. In one of the film’s most striking scenes, Diara confronts him with the extent to which his – and those like him’s – moral superiority insidiously operates, when Sérgio tells her that someone has offered him 150.000 euros to deliver his report earlier than he had initially planned. As if white men were not the very source of poverty and underdevelopment, they not only ease their conscience by striving to mend them, but also pride themselves on being in a position to decide what the “right way” to do so is. Sérgio’s self-effacing, amenable attitude thus appears as if he is rather unconsciously trying to compensate for the unwarranted position of power he has found himself in – especially as his queerness, his passivity, so to speak, opens up a grey zone that invalidates pre-designated positions of power and offers fleeting, fragile, yet nonetheless potent configurations based on intimacy and sensuality. With Sérgio in constant oscillation between these contradictory yet complementary stances, O Riso e a Faca never takes the impossibility of authentic human connection for granted; it asserts that fully immersing oneself in the post-colonial condition, along with its limits and shortcomings, is the only way to achieve it, even if only momentarily.