O animal cordial: an erasure on reason

Abstract

This essay proposes a reading about the fill-lenth film O animal cordial, of the screen-writter and director Gabriela Amaral Almeida (2018). The ideia was to cover the plot observing the characters and describing how the Brazilian sreen-writter and diretor questioned the validity and the appropriateness of the expression “homem cordial”, described by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1995) in his sociological analysis found in the book Raízes do Brasil. My proposal is to perceive (1) how that significant persists in  contemporaneity in spite of its anachronistic sendings, and (2) in which way the film, beyond being a complaint-reading of this anachronism, is also a possibility of a rewriting of the concept by obliteration. Almeida (2018) films a night in a Brazilian restaurant attended by people who belong to an upper-middle social class, or to a class that moves economically upward way. What we watch that night is the downfall process of the “man” who changes place with the “animal” and brings about an overwriting, not only of the “man”, meaning the masculine genre, but of the “humankind” as a hole. This violent and bloody rewritting is what interests me in this film. In other words, what I present in this text stood up for the thinking of Hélène Cixous (1995), Alexandre Nodari (2017) and Achille Mbembe (2018), because, to my point, this process is what the full-lengh Brazilian film exposes in a beautiful and fierce way pointing “devires”.