Satirists these days are given to complaining that their job is impossible, that the slate of clownish authoritarian world leaders cannot be made more preposterous than they already are. Spare a thought, though, for writers of dystopian fiction. For decades, these stories enjoyed an exalted status. They were the fictions that woke you up, that forced you to accept that civil war, extreme inequality, corporate-controlled government and totalitarian thought control can happen where you live. Nowadays, most people are painfully aware of this, and as a result even the direst dystopian fiction seems naïve in its belief that we haven’t noticed yet.
For this writer, the most interesting dystopian fictions to revisit with modern eyes are those in the vein of Never Let Me Go and The Plot Against America, ones that aren’t about evil tyrants or heroic rebels, but which take stock futuristic societies – organ-harvesting biotech dystopias, alternate WWII history – and try to imagine what an ordinary life would be like in these worlds. They do seem to capture something of what life is like now, of muddling along while your country collapses out of democracy. Gabriel Mascaro’s Divine Love, released for the first time in the UK on Blu-Ray from Second Run, is another provocative example of this subgenre-within-a-subgenre.
In the case of Divine Love, the familiar concept being explored from a fresh angle is a modern-day theocracy. Mascaro’s film takes its title from its fictional oppressors, the Church of Divine Love, whose rave-like mass gatherings have – according to the opening voiceover – overtaken the Rio Carnival as Brazil’s biggest event. The Church of Divine Love use loosely Christian trappings but, as David Jenkins perceptively notes in the accompanying booklet, there is no mention of Jesus in the whole film. Rather than spirituality, the Church’s true calling is authoritarian social control, a system which Mascaro’s heroine Joana both loyally serves and is oppressed by.
I don’t think the concept behind Divine Love will seem as foreign to British audiences as it might have in previous eras. If anything, it might give you some insight into why Kemi Badenoch and Elon Musk keep waffling on about birth rates.
Joana is played, wonderfully, by Dira Paes, a veteran actress and TV presenter who made her screen debut in John Boorman’s 1985 film The Emerald Forest. She’s trying for a baby, as all Brazilian women must in this theocratic future. But she can’t conceive, and the social penalties for not reproducing means she has to take extreme measures to remedy this. At one point she goes to a group sex party, reasoning that by the law of averages she has a better chance of conceiving there than she does with just one man at home. It’s a wonderfully perverse chain of logic, and it does put its finger on the strange mix of chan-board libertinism and uptight puritanism that fuels the modern far right.
Divine Love is very prescient in this way, although Mascaro didn’t have to use his imagination to come up with this. As he notes in separate insightful interviews on the disc and in the booklet, he began writing Divine Love as a response to the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, a man who once expressed his opposition to LGBTQ+ pride parades by tweeting gay pee-fetish pornography. The film nevertheless feels completely relevant during Trump’s second term, although it isn’t always as dramatically strong as it is politically insightful. The core situation of Joana’s life under this bizarre government is fascinating enough for Mascaro to spend most of the film’s first hour exploring it, after which it seems to run out of steam before rallying itself for what is, admittedly, a pretty brilliant twist ending.
Still, there’s a lot to like here: Diego Garcia’s neon-hued cinematography, the throbbing synth score by Juan Campodonico, Santiago Marrero and Otavio Santos, Paes’s go-for-broke performance. Bolsonaro’s current trial shows Brazil is leading the world in acting against its anti-democratic fringe, and Divine Love can stand alongside films like Bacarau and I’m Still Here as examples of it nailing the cultural response too. If any of the specifically Brazilian political and cultural references sail over your head, the aforementioned interviews and booklet sees Mascaro and Jenkins give a thorough overview of the film’s real-world inspirations. Equally, though, I don’t think the concept behind Divine Love will seem as foreign to British audiences as it might have in previous eras. If anything, it might give you some insight into why Kemi Badenoch and Elon Musk keep waffling on about birth rates.
DIVINE LOVE IS OUT NOW ON SECOND RUN BLU-RAY
