8/18/2019 Review Santiago Luz Horne

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 antiago

Studio: VideofilmesDirector: João Moreira Salles

Producer: Mauricio Andrade Ramos; Beto BrunoScreenwriter: João Moreira SallesCinematographer: Walter Carvalho ABC Art Director: Marlise StorchiEditor: Eduardo Escoral; Lívia SerpaDuration: 80 minutesGenre: Documentary Year: 2007

Synopsis:

 João Moreira Salles started to make a documentary thirteen years before making Santiago, buthe never finished it. That film was about Santiago Badariotti Merlo, the butler of his family, a wealthy and influencial Brazilian family. Santiago is a film about that failed film. Even if itstheme is based on the prior footage and maintains its focus on the butler’s life, it is muchmore ambiguous and ambitious. It is still a movie about Santiago: an Argentine who servedthe Moreira Salles family for thirty years and who spent most of his free time writing aboutroyal European dynasties. However, the movie is also a brilliant reflective, melancholic andautobiographical work that dwells on the director’s childhood home and memories and onthe hierarchical relationships between a servant and the boss’s son, and between an object ofdocumentation and a film director.

Critique: 

Santiago begins with a self-critique. A narrator in first person imitates the director and tellsthe spectator how he wanted the original movie to open. The film we watch starts the same way he intended the original failed film to start. However, the ironic distance of thenarrator’s comments highlights the impossibility of adopting a simple linear narrative whentaking on personal memories, or of assuming an objective point of view when making adocumentary. The butler’s perspective is –in this sense– privileged. Internal enough to thedirector’s family, but not completely part of it, Santiago has an ambiguous status as amember of the house. João Moreira Salles assumes this displaced position to talk about hischildhood and about his family. In this move, he creates a tension between his earlier naïvestance as a filmmaker and the current one, which is highly reflective and critical.

In the course of the film, we watch repeated scenes from the old movie in which we hear thedirector’s voice giving orders to Santiago. Toward the end of the movie, the critique of thedirector’s position is made explicit: the narrator says the absence of close-ups of Santiago’sface, the distance he maintained with the person behind the butler and the way he conductedthe interview are due to the fact that he never ceased to be the boss’s son and Santiago, theservant. In this sense, Santiago is a film about power, about the hierarchy conveyed in beingthe “masters”, but also in being the director of the film, revealing the documentalist’sposition as hierarchical. However, in this gesture the film reverts the problem. The director

8/18/2019 Review Santiago Luz Horne

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could have chosen to talk about a family such as his from a magnificent angle, highlightingthe opulence and the famous names of Brazilian political and cultural life that passedthrough their lives, but he chooses instead the servant’s perspective: a domestic-behind thescenes point of view.

Santiago talks about his favorite characters of the Royal European dynasties and about the

parties at the Moreira Salles’s house longing for a world that no longer exist. Thismelancholic tone is highlighted in the film by the beautiful black and white images of theMoreira Salles’s huge and empty Modernist house in Rio de Janeiro, probably meant for thespectator to imagine a past that is now gone: children playing inside the house; elegantdinners and parties; servants walking around eminent characters such as Christina Onassis, Jucelino Kubitschek or João Goulart. But the detailed and minor perspective Santiagoadopts to talk about his favorite characters gives a domestic perspective that is taken up bythe director to regain an intimacy with his own personal past. Toward the end of the movie, we watch close-ups of Santiago’s writings while the director reads aloud some sections in which the lives of famous people are rescued through anecdotes that seem insignificant andgratuitous, showing that these tiny details are also part of History. In this way, we end up

having the feeling that even public families such as the Moreira Salles’s have intimate livesand minor stories to tell. It’s just a question of finding the right –critical, reflexive, displaced–perspective to do it.