‘Carnival Is Over’: Tallinn Review

Dir/scr: Fernando Coimbra. Brazil/Portugal. 2024. 123mins

For Valerio (Irandhir Santos), the underworld household enterprise, inherited from his late father, is a jail. Valerio and his high-maintenance spouse Regina (Leandra Leal) would favor to money in his share of the unlawful lottery syndicate that’s his birthright, and luxuriate in life in his villa within the hills of Rio De Janeiro. However in Fernando Coimbra’s droll neo-noir, each try to flee pulls the couple additional again in. This darkly comedian story feels just a little overstretched and will maybe have dealt with a firmer hand within the edit. However Santos and Leal each impress, with performances which can be as dedicated to mining the movie’s mordant humour as they’re to its spiralling violence and treachery.

Slick foreign-language style fare

This wry crime thriller reunites author/director Coimbra with Leal, who starred in his acclaimed, multi-award-winning function debut, A Wolf At The Door (2013). The movie, which additionally handled Brazil’s prison underbelly (albeit with a much less comedic tone), claimed prizes at Rio and San Sebastian festivals amongst others. Coimbra’s subsequent work contains the English-language Netflix Gulf Conflict drama Sandcastles, and in depth tv work together with Narcos and Perry Mason. Carnival Is Over screens in Tallinn having premiered in Toronto, and is slated for launch in Brazil within the first quarter of 2025. Elsewhere, the image might tempt streaming platforms on the lookout for slick foreign-language style fare.

Coimbra neatly introduces one of many movie’s central themes – problems with belief, authenticity and the concept that Valerio and Regina are taking part in the roles of mafioso energy brokers – in an early sequence. Having spent a nice afternoon bossing across the labourers engaged on her in depth house renovation, Regina retires to her bed room. There she is stunned by a black-clad masked determine wielding a knife. What at first appears to be a theft takes a sexual flip, which is then revealed to be an erotic role-playing state of affairs between the couple. A state of affairs wherein Valerio barely overstepps: “I like knives, not bruises,” scolds his spouse afterwards.

However whereas the bodily facet of their relationship is wholesome sufficient, the monetary aspect is much less so. Regina is horrified to study that her husband is broke and that she should cancel her renovation plans. The couple plans to promote half of the enterprise to their accomplice, Valerio’s uncle Linduarte (Stepan Nercessian) – a shady particular person who could have had one thing to do with Valerio’s father’s loss of life. However Linduarte has his personal plans and Valerio finds himself lumbered with the entire enterprise, full with but extra debt.

Voluptuous femme fatale Regina shifts into Girl Macbeth mode, encouraging her husband to take more and more excessive programs of motion. However as Valerio settles into the function of mafia boss like a duck to water, a wedge seems between the couple who not know who they will belief – together with one another. In the meantime, Regina’s mom is behind the scenes, pulling her daughter’s strings along with her personal self-interested agenda at play, and a federal investigator is circling, planting seeds of doubt in regards to the trustworthiness of Valerio’s inside circle.

Coimbra makes good use of the home as a metaphor for the lives of its house owners: the polished, freshly painted facade is marked by persistent stains that linger like a responsible conscience. The partitions, like the wedding, could look structurally sound, however they conceal a mess of secrets and techniques. Best, nevertheless, is the movie’s use of music, which mixes sleazy, down-at-heel tenor sax with frenzied samba and drums that rattle like gunfire.