Restos do Vento
Violence begets violence, silence continues the suffering, vengeful catharsis only delays the problem. In this case, for the next generation.
Due to ancient traditions of genetic mixing, aka excuses to get boys and girls together in social contexts, a teenager is nearly gang raped by hooded hoodlums. Luckily, her crypto lover stops it in the nick of time, and for this, he gets the crap kicked out of him, and sees the girl marry not one but two of her attackers. The crypto lover limps home, licking his wounds.
Twenty years later, the boys and girls are all grown up. The crypto lover keeps his crypto love, but turns into the village idiot. The alpha rapist marries the meek girl, they have a child, then they divorce. She marries yet another of her hooded attackers, but keeps sticking the knife on the crypto lover, always tantalising with her presence, never giving in. No wonder he is mentally broken.
For unexplored reasons, our female protagonist chooses this path, instead of running away from the village for ever. Nobody’s perfect.
Destiny conspires to not repeat the story, but to rhyme. The son of the alpha rapist (now the biggest business owner in town), known philanderer and layabout, is found dead, and worse, killed by stab wounds.
The game is afoot, and small murder mystery forms: is it the guy who owes him 40 grand? Maybe the village idiot, as revenge for the sins of the father? Or perhaps the girl he was trying to bang, the daughter of the protagonist?
This is not a very mysterious mystery, since it is quickly revealed the girl did it, with the knife, on the woods. The motive is a botched rape, again.
The prime suspect is of course the village idiot, since he has no alibi, motive and means. Everyone knows this, including our female protagonist, that begs her old idiot lover to give himself to the cops so that her daughter can live her full life. Perhaps to live the life she herself wanted to have lived.
That old love must have run deep, because he does confess to a murder he did not commit, and this is done without exchange of favours, let alone bodily fluids. The local cop (and the latest husband of our protagonist) can clearly see this is bogus, digs a little more and finds out the truth.
As bookends, a nice clear mirror from the start of the film, the gang gets back together, including the new meat, to gang up on the village idiot and erase all evidence that anything was ever in doubt. The “killer” is vanquished, and the village returns to its quietude, remaining rotten to the core in the hearts of everyone.
The events are primed to be repeated again, and again.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.