Following fast on the heels of Carolina Markowicz’s award-winning 2022 feature debut Charcoal, her second feature Toll (Pedagio) reprises the grungy working class lifestyle of rural Brazil where religion rhymes with superstition, gayness is seen as an illness, and criminal activities are viewed as necessary evils for survival.
Once again featuring sure-footed Brazilian art house actress Maeve Jinkings as the single mother Suellen who can’t bring herself to accept her son Tiquinho’s desire for men, Toll is almost a companion piece to Charcoal, which won prizes at festivals from Rio de Janeiro to Transilvania (Markowicz was also voted best first-time director at the Cinema Brazil awards.) Here, however, the farcical humor is mostly restricted to Suellen’s crazy scheme to convert Tiquinho into a heterosexual family man, while the rest of the film drags its heels describing her tiresome job as a toll booth attendant on a mountain highway. After bowing in Toronto, it closes San Sebastian’s Horizontes Latinos on a rather dour note, while rightly underlining the section’s focus on social themes and new women directors.
Suellen and Tiquinho – who are genuinely close, despite their differing ideas about homosexuality – share a cramped apartment with the laid-back Arauto (Thomás Aquino), a petty thief who more or less lives at Suellen’s expense. When she discovers his stash of stolen watches and jewelry, she’s upset enough to throw him out, but later the situation changes and they go into business together with a Bonnie and Clyde exuberance that puts the zing back in their sex life.
Meanwhile, the 17-year-old Tiquinho, played with melancholy flair tinged with touching seriousness by an excellent Kauan Alvarenga, goes to high school, suffers an unreturned crush on a boy his age, and much to his mom’s shame, posts videos of himself dressed up and crooning old-fashioned songs. Suellen’s great anti-gay obsession leads her to light “virility” candles in a mountain sanctuary at 5:30 in the morning before going to work, but her eccentric friend and co-worker Telma (the always amusing Aline Marta Maia) urges her to get “scientific” and enroll him in a pricey sexual re-education course run by a fishy foreign pastor (Isac Graca, looking like a grave Jesus Christ while saying the most outrageous things). Lines like “Satan lives in a boy’s body until he’s 17, then it’s squatters’ rights” get a laugh. But the screenplay often gets bogged down in Suellen’s misguided attempts to redirect her son’s life, like getting him a job as a forklift operator when he so obviously is drawn to performing.
Editors Ricardo Saraiva and Lautaro Colace keep the balls rolling gracefully, and we first see Tiquinho sitting at the well-attended course before we find out how Suellen has managed to finance this folly. Suffice it to say that armed robbery triggered by phone calls from the toll booth are involved. What is more surprising is how many attendees Pastor Isac has signed up, both men and women. In one absurd therapy session, they are made to remodel clay phalluses into the shape of vaginas (for the men) and vice versa for the women. But there is a silver lining for Tiquinho, who has a chance to meet other gay men and move on from his crush, opening the door to a satisfying resolution that sidesteps some threatened melodrama.
Noteworthy here in establishing atmosphere and contrast are D.P. Luis Armando Arteaga’s impressions of the remote landscape of virgin forests defaced by smoking industrial chimneys and metal trellises reaching into the sky. On the other end of the spectrum are the labyrinthine hovels where the characters do their best to live, shot like animal warrens of unfinished concrete.
Director, screenplay: Carolina Markowicz
Cast: Maeve Jinkings, Kauan Alvarenga, Thomás Aquino, Aline Marta Maia, Caio Acedo, Isac Graça, Erom Cordeira
Producers: Karen Castanho, Bianca Villar, Fernando Fraiha, Luis Urbano
Cinematography: Luis Armando Arteaga
Editing: Ricardo Saraiva, Lautaro Colace
Music: Filipe Derado
Sound: André Bellentani
Production companies: Bionica Filmes (Brazil), O Som e a Furia (Portugal)
World Sales: Luxbox (France)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Horizontes Latinos)
In Portuguese
101 minutes
