Where Homer’s Odyssey featured the originary myth of homecoming, the modern sojourner often seeks first to venture outside before finding, in the process, his true self. The übermodern soul, being born after the fascist decades and into a century of fascist neoliberalism, reverts to the Homeric insofar as he searches within. He partakes in the delights of psychedelia and indulges the pomp of postmodernism, all this not to discover the inner life necessarily, but to engineer it to its best approximations. Freudian neuroses rear their electric synapses in drug-fueled benders, more so than any during periods of cultural turmoil and disarray, as the countercultural ’50s and ’80s would corroborate. It is with this perspective that the pulsating undercurrents of Brazilian filmmaker Thales Banzai’s Tony Odyssey come into some semblance of focus. A wild and irreverent debut dropping Beat-gen aesthetics into a conglomeration of gorgeously frantic non-sequiturs, the film hews close to a black-and-white acid Western symphony, but shot with a true streak of youthful, rebellious independence.
A horse cart pulls into a roadside shack in the middle of nowhere, where our quiet, eponymous protagonist (Kelson Succi) slaves away in the sweltering heat. The cart’s driver, Ivy (Iraci Estrela), stands out immediately as a plump and boisterous woman in the arid, macho-coded space. She gets Tony abruptly (and not wholly consentingly) onboard her plan to rob the store at gunpoint, stick it to its fearsome owner (Sandro Guerra), and make off with his stash of lysergic drugs — referred to rather literally as “paste.” “You lack revolt,” Ivy tells Tony, goading him toward a life completely removed from his humdrum reality. The implications are as political as they are personal: as the duo absorb the black tar, notably through their eyes, they embark on a trip out of the crosshairs of traditional capitalist exploitation and into a speculative, purgatorial realm in search of their maker. While Tony confronts his life and times in uncanny detail, Banzai entreats his audience to a similarly playful succession of scenes and fragments dredged from the director’s generational subconscious. The Brazil of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s films, with all their vehement depictions of national trauma and iniquity, is in comparison a moderately conservative one.
To be fair, The Secret Agent was fundamentally a historical account of the lives lost to tyranny and the glimmers of those found within; for Banzai, historical signifiers take precedence over historical reality in the film’s swirling mélange of phantasmagoria. Divided into five chapters, each more surreal than the last, Tony Odyssey coalesces around its protagonist’s intensely personal awakening and attempt to decode the secrets of the universe. It is radical and free, existing without any need to justify the merits of its story. Across a sprawling oneiric canvas of bar songs and car accidents, Tony and Ivy hear their subconscious read back to them: an old aesthete laments the “pose and anxiety” of the PoMo crowd, one of a gaggle of “simulated” characters and fellow dream-voyagers alike accompanying their quest for transcendent truth. For a film whose influences span the hallucinogenic vagaries of Naked Lunch and the Kafkaesque underbelly of The Trial (with a dollop of Norbert Pfaffenbichler’s subterranean 2551 for good measure), Tony Odyssey, unsurprisingly, declines to alight on some grand universal discovery. Its grandeur and beauty instead lie precisely in its manic and shimmering tapestry.
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