The only Brazilian feature in competition at this year’s SXSW, My Drywall Cocoon has a director who may not be familiar to English-language audiences, albeit largely due to the timidity of our distributors. Caroline Fioratti’s debut feature Meus 15 Anos was a huge crowd-pleaser in Brazil, but crowd-pleasers tend not to get picked up by the art-house circuit. My Drywall Cocoon looks more promising, staking out territory adjacent to Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds in examining the intersecting lives of one apartment complex’s residents. The ambition is to create a cumulative portrait of Brazil’s youth through their reactions to one tragedy: the death of a young girl during her seventeenth birthday party.
The cause of Virginia’s death is initially a mystery, told in flashbacks and present-day scenes that are artfully differentiated by cinematographer Helcio German Nagamine. The effects it has, though, are very clear. Party-happy teenagers necking drugs in the flashbacks are hollow, grey-eyed shells in the present-day scenes, and Virginia’s mother Patricia is understandably bearing up worse than anyone else. The fact that they’re not coping is understandable; the way Fioratti dramatises their collapse is more of a sticking point.
Nothing wrong with ambition, of course, and there were moments during this unapologetically mainstream, wide-reaching film where I wished more British directors felt empowered to address politics in this showy a fashion.
This kind of social cross-section drama always casts its net as wide as possible, but there’s something about doing it with teenage characters that encourages writers and directors to bite off more than they can chew. Like John Singleton’s Higher Learning, or TV series like Skins and Thirteen Reasons Why, My Drywall Cocoon aims not so much to tackle issues as tackle all the issues: economic and racial inequality, closeted sexuality, drug use, mental health, toxic masculinity, domestic violence, political radicalisation… it’s all here. Those who felt Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light was overstuffed because it addressed racism and mental illness will feel like a foie-gras goose by the end of this.
Nothing wrong with ambition, of course, and there were moments during this unapologetically mainstream, wide-reaching film where I wished more British directors felt empowered to address politics in this showy a fashion. Even when the drama doesn’t work, the visuals do. The final rapprochement between the characters Gabriel and Luana, who’s previously referred to him as “GaBin Laden”, might be an unpersuasive end to that subplot but the framing, with them both sat on playground swings at opposite ends of the big wide aspect ratio, is exquisite.
The ultimate effect of cramming all this into 115 minutes is that everything escalates too quickly, even with the flashback structure providing a perfect excuse to hop over connective tissue. One minute we’re watching overprivileged teens trying to get hold of “ecstasy and Molly” (which are the same thing, aren’t they?), and the next we’re watching a girl being made to suck on the barrel of a possibly-loaded gun like James Franco in Spring Breakers. For all its attempts to encapsulate the struggles of Brazilian youth, the most persuasive performance comes from Maria Luisa Mendonça as Patricia, whose suffocating closeness to her late daughter is established in an early flashback when she offers Virginia one of her own dresses to wear at her birthday party: “We’re the same size, it’ll fit”. A few more moments that subtle would have made all the difference.
My Drywall Cocoon (2023) recieved its world premiere at SXSW 2023
