A girl, dancing to the notes of a pacifist ballad, improvises a striptease and starts an orgy that ends in bloodshed. A mother watches her daughter flirt with a man while stimulating a pony. A repulsive fat erotomaniac turns into a pig in the eyes of a virgin he insults. A young man gets aroused by doing laundry in front of two half-naked maidens. The whole thing is, according to the theories of a rather singular doctor, the effect that drug use conceives on some individuals. Indeed, the luminary is interested in performing some experiments on some subjects in order to document his theories in book form.
In this regard, while projecting the extravagant sequence of images in the presence of other doubtful lecturers, the doctor submits some footage to the attention of Mojica Marins: in fact, as the motif of one of his experiments carried out by means of psychotropic substances, the scholar puts the figure of Zé do Caixão at the center of the test...
Awakening the Beast (O ritual dos sádicos) The first 45 minutes of the film, hypnotic and disorienting, seem like vitriolic vignettes with no apparent logic. Until, in addition to appearing the figure of the psychologist, Mojica Marins also appears in the role... of himself (citation: "Zé I left him at the cemetery, I am Mr. Mojica Marins").
When, in the visions of the subjects undergoing the experiment, the figure of Zé appears, the film takes a chaotic turn devoid of rational "sense." privileging a set of "Dante's circle" sequences, in which torture and torture follow one another (with women slapped, flogged and "kicked" in the shallow end by Zé who appears -and disappears- like an evil Harry Houdini) in a dimension placed in "limbo" (or rather: in the antechamber of Hell).
Final Redde Rationem, with the revelation that the psychotropic substance was nothing more than distilled water: and a sadist's ritual is configured, beyond measure, as a liturgy of masochists....
Bunelian sequences, delirious moments and even theories of meta-cinema (almost 30 years ahead of its time!) make the film an unclassifiable mostrum, a magma of ideas, notes, self-quotations (one test consists of subjecting the participants' vision to A Midnight I Will Possess Your Soul), insights in the making, a slap in the face of conventions and the reins of genres. A challenge to the viewer's laziness, placed here before a total and absolute sensory experience...
In conclusion, this O Despertar da Besta, sanctions a break between the director's earlier and later production; a development to a later stage, strictu sensu, of maturation and reflection on filmic matter and its hieratic appearance...
Note: The version circulated, for the first time in Italy, on T+ (dated March 16, 1998) is O Despertar da Besta (cut version, i.e., purged of the most explicit scenes at the beginning of the film)...
Reviewde by Undying1
