Walter Salles
Walter Moreira Salles Júnior is the central figure of Brazil's cinema retomada, the revival that followed the near-total shutdown of the country's film industry in the early 1990s. His films watch places carefully and trust landscape to carry emotion that dialogue would flatten, which is why the road movie keeps being the form he returns to.
Central Station made the argument. A cynical letter-writer at a Rio railway station is pulled north by a boy looking for his father, and the journey does what journeys do in Salles: it strips both of them down to what they will admit. The Motorcycle Diaries applies the same method to a young Che Guevara crossing South America and declines to make him a saint in advance. On the Road is the case where the method met a novel that resists it.
He has worked in English and inside the Hollywood system, including the remake Dark Water, which is the least characteristic thing he has done. I'm Still Here brought him back to Brazil and to the dictatorship years, told from inside one family's house. His accolades include an Academy Award for Best International Film, three Cannes prizes, three Venice prizes, two British Academy Film Awards, a Golden Bear and a Golden Globe, an unusual spread for a director who has never once made a film in a hurry.
Movies (8)
Books (1)
Where to start with Walter Salles
Central Station first, without hesitation. It is one of the great road films and it needs no context at all: two people who do not much like each other crossing a country, with Fernanda Montenegro giving a performance that would work in any language.
Then I'm Still Here, his return to Brazil and his most political film, which keeps a family's ordinary routines in the foreground while the dictatorship presses on the edges of the frame.
The Motorcycle Diaries is the crowd-pleaser and the best-looking of them, though it is gentler than its subject. On the Road is the interesting failure: gorgeous, faithful and never quite alive, which may say more about the novel than about the film. Dark Water is the Hollywood job, worth your time only if you like the American horror remakes of that decade, and Paris Je T'aime holds a short segment of his if you want a small sample.