“Democracy dies in darkness,” the slogan of The Washington Post, couldn’t be further removed from the salvational rhetoric witnessed in Brazil with the rise of political Evangelicalism. But it is, and not without good reason; as the thesis of Petra Costa’s latest documentary goes, the light of religion is at odds with human flourishing, because — if we look closely — it’s not really quite bright at all out there. Apocalypse in the Tropics, a chronicle of Brazil under the rule of strongman Jair Bolsonaro, is by many accounts a detailed and first-hand foray into the gloomy cataclysms of unreason and unease that have beset an erstwhile robust democracy, as Costa devotes most of her screentime to profiling their insidious harbingers. Yet this phenomenon is nothing new, and neither is the film’s treatment of it. What emerges from the filmmaker’s efforts is well-meaning, but fundamentally incurious and more than a little imperious.
Structured chronologically and sprinkled with eschatological imagery (in the form of medieval tableaux and modern intertitles), Apocalypse in the Tropics examines the erosion of Brazil’s democratic process by the firm hand of God, whose authority a few of His ecclesiastical members have wielded in their attempts to become kingmakers. A tale as old as time, albeit somewhat less dramatic than the schism between King and Pope, the spiritual crisis engendered and exploited by Bolsonaro and his former ally Silas Malafaia has wrought severe — perhaps irreversible — damage to the nation’s dream of social democratic modernism, as was consecrated in the architectural blueprint of its capital, Brasília. Costa extracts evidence of this straight from the horse’s mouth, notably through several interviews with Malafaia, a Pentecostal firebrand channelling America’s Southern Baptist preacher Billy Graham and spouting spurious (if not openly hateful) claims about poverty, gay rights, and the rule of law among other cornerstones of civil society.
All this, however, inundates more than it intrigues: parallels with the United States’ glorious experiment with democratic backsliding are painfully apparent, but the film appears mostly content to coast on popular anti-conservative outrage while providing an equally superficial introduction to the fundamentalist teachings of John Nelson Darby, whose literal readings of the Bible have prompted a surge in millenarianist ideology, most notably instantiated in the proliferation of dominionism. This theocratic belief in the merging of church and state is naturally ripe for further investigation, which Costa does, somewhat cursorily, in her reliance on first-hand accounts and a sterilized first-person narration.
At the expense of more engaged interviews with the people proper, this medium also glosses over the politics and persona of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Bolsonaro’s chief opponent, which makes for a chummy, self-satisfying liberal viewing experience, not unlike the valorization of Joe Biden as Donald Trump’s foil. “The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything,” the jurist and theologian Carl Schmitt had said. As a follow-up to The Edge of Democracy, Costa’s acclaimed 2019 doc, Apocalypse in the Tropics zealously aims to validate this claim, to the effect that Brasília, much like Washington’s city upon a shining, democratic hill, is paradoxically less an exceptionally debased experiment than an uncomfortably routine consequence of democracy itself. Though the matter is urgent and the subject eminently worthy of study, the film resembles, ironically, a sermon of its own, preaching to the converted outsiders a watered-down version of its gospel.
DIRECTOR: Petra Costa; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; IN THEATERS: July 11; STREAMING: July 14; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 50 min.
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