– The Red Light Bandit is the movie for the weekend. In this section every Saturday or Sunday Celluloid Dimension picks a movie for the weekend. The selections are preferably underrated movies or neglected movies that we think should get more attention. Have fun with these recommendations. –
Directed by Rogério Sganzerla
Written by Rogério Sganzerla
Starring:
- Paulo Villaça as Bandido da Luz Vermelha
- Helena Ignez as Janete Jane
- Luiz Linhares as Delegado Cabeção
- Pagano Sobrinho as J.B. da Silva
Rating: 
Mythologizing a criminal doesn’t get as Nouvelle Vague-ish as this path-breaking Brazilian landmark of Cinema Marginal directed by radical wannabe Orson Welles filmmaker Rogério Sganzerla. A 22-year-old filmmaker stepping into the Brazilian underground cinema scene at the precise juncture to disrupt the neorealist status quo of Cinema Novo by introducing sleaze to vanguardist praxis, Wellesian kinetics mingling with guerrilla filmmaking and, most importantly, political irreverence through iconoclastic formalism. It’s the stuff masterpieces are made of. Intermittently chronicled by the sensationalist wordiness of the press about the ongoing misdeeds carried out by The Red Light Bandit, a criminal from the slums terrorizing the bourgeoisie of Sao Paulo. Third World pandemonium turned into a Latino American western featuring one of the sharpest modern satires on post-war capitalist fetishes, lumpenproletariat complacency and the new dictatorships staged in delirious dystopian theatrics.
Paulo Villaça playing the eponymous sleazeball – he’s a ruthless bandit and revels in it, but nothing thrills him more than raping his female victims – but the irony is that our kinky outlaw isn’t much different from the gluttonous political elite. This indistinguishable societal decadence dramatized as a turbulent non-linear crime epic – riddled with staccato sequences and bouncy editing – is meant to strike more as an antithesis to the elitist European vocabulary that dominated pre-1960s cinema fashions than a bona fide grassroots reaction to Brazil’s then-military tyranny. These features of pure formalistic obduracy I must admit that I was not fully enchanted by them – such as replacing the leading role of the crook with that of a rapacious politician right in the middle acts when, in my view, Paulo Villaça’s performance was just starting to reach the mystique of a pop anti-hero par excellence; the notorious villain was always expected to be primordial. Nevertheless, this experimental frenetic method of converting the incendiary exhilaration of a tabloid interpretation into cinematic subversion stands as an act of artistic urgency and galvanizing force. The closest sensationalism has come to becoming fine art.
