sneersnipe film review

The Conception (A Concepcao) José Eduardo Belmonte Brazil 2005

The Conception is the story of a wild trip and bumpy comedown. It is the story of Alex, Lino and Liz, the bored sons and daughter of career diplomats, Ariane, a girl in the grip of despair picked up in a bar, and a man called X, nameless and inscrutable, who crashes into their life and twice provides the catalyst for its transformation.

José Eduardo Belmonte’s film begins with scraps of footage from the construction of Brasilia, where the story is set. The city was erected ex-nihilo in the 1950s from the empty, dusty planes of Brazil’s interior, an act intended to propel Brasil into a future of fulfilment. The Conception deals with the children of what the city actually became, a lifeless city of elite bureaucracy. The characters, natives raised in an atmosphere of privilege and neglect, strive to create lives over an abyss of boredom and emptiness. Initially, their attempts are limited to the normal teenage kicks, but with the arrival of X, events take a turn to the extreme. Without a past or a name, X, who is just as adept at fabricating drugs and he is at fraud and embezzlement, codifies their disjointed activities into a creed he terms “conceptualism”, which involves the abolition of the ego and the absolute excess in equal measure. Cue debauchery, drug-abuse, ostentatious rebellion and polymorphic hedonism, underwritten by careless fraud until a reality in abeyance crashes in and breaks up the party.

Similar to Brasilia, a vision of the future built in the 1950s, The Conception is hard to pin down in time. The conceptualists seem to live in a recycled mishmash of ill-digested 1960s radical philosophy, 70s glam aesthetics and transgression, punk aggro and the crashing bad taste of the 80s. Within this kitsch world, Belmonte seems to want to say something about emptiness and plenty, fulfilment and frustration. Something along the lines of a Brazilian mishmash of The Dreamers, Performance and Requiem for a Dream, whilst the premises are interesting, the film is swishly shot and its setting intrigues, The Conception ultimately falls short of its style and Belmonte’s pretensions. The environment and society of Brasilia, which I’ve never before seen represented in Brazilian film, cries out for cinematic treatment. Unfortunately, The Conception runs out of narrative steam at about the point that its conceit is established. The characters remain opaque, the story stalls and, like the protagonists, gets stuck in the superfice of sex, partying and drug-taking. Aside from the character of Ariane, there is little indication that the characters have felt or thought anything at all.

The Conception exhausts the viewers’ reaction to its themes in the course of their narration. In a sense, Belmonte’s film is very similar to Conceptualism, a bag of interesting ideas, styles and aims that fails to cohere into anything truly meaningful.

pmc