Riocorrente

‘It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?’ This is how Riocorrente, a portrait of three people, but above all an impression of a moment of crisis, opens. The moment when tension is at its greatest, when change is unavoidable, when doing nothing is no longer an option.
Carlos is a former car thief trying to stay on the straight and narrow, among other things by taking street kid Exu under his wing. Marcelo is an art critic for a major newspaper; living a life in the service of big ideas. Renata goes back and forth between the two: the ascetic and the Molotov cocktail thrower, the extremes of her desire.
However, Paulo Sacramento’s elliptic film – dedicated to Brazilian director Carlos Reichenbach, who died in 2012 – is not about the love triangle melodrama. Its focus is more on the pressure that has built up within the three. Not the narrative’s facts but its atmosphere, created using brooding images, and the indefinable soundtrack are important.
Balance has been lost, an inequality has lasted too long and now has to change. The film therefore also has a lot to say about contemporary Brazil. Not as a didactic pamphlet, but as an urgent, poetic reflection on a society in which everything is set to change.

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