Photo Courtesy City Lights Pictures

After a recent screening of his debut feature documentary Manda Bala (Send A Bullet), director Jason Kohn was asked by an audience member about his goals in making the film. Without skipping a beat Kohn responded bluntly, “To entertain people,” before moving on to the next question. This narrow objective is remarkably unsettling as the sole motivation for a documentary and especially problematic given the film’s complex themes of corruption and violence in Brazilian society.

Essentially, Mr. Kohn’s film avoids context for the sake of amusement, relying instead on stylized visual metaphors and witty editing to highlight the sensational and connect the many jagged pieces of a dense puzzle. By seeking to entertain at every turn, Manda Bala circumvents the essential inquisitive thread that gives the best documentaries substance.

Without offering any explanation as to why, an early title informs us that the film “cannot be shown” in Brazil. The filmmakers are determined to emphasize how scandalous what we are about to see is and that we are somehow privy to this information. The mysterious tone of this introduction sets the stage for the lurid spectacle that is to come.

The film introduces a frog farmer in central Brazil whose idiosyncrasy serves as an exotic segue to a well-known money laundering corruption scandal which ties high level politicians to the man’s business. Next, a successful businessman so terrified by the violence of São Paulo is inspired to start an automobile bullet-proofing service for the city’s rich. Then a kidnapping victim relives how she had her ears savagely cut off to be used as ransom bait. Cut then to the plastic surgeon who appears to have made a specialty, and a fortune, out of reconstructing such victims’ ears. A police officer shares some war stories and shows off his arsenal, while a professional kidnapper shows no signs of remorse for his dirty work. Interspersed within these appalling stories are details about Jader Barbalho, a corrupt senator involved with the frog farm scandal who manages to get himself re-elected, along with accounts from the attorneys in charge of prosecuting him. All-in-all these are gruesome stories that make obvious the deplorable situation of a society being gorged by the widening chasm between the rich and the miserably poor. Unfortunately, however, the stories never amount to anything more than tabloid sensationalism.

The graphic visuals that accompany these tales further emphasize this and often function as simplistic metaphors to lubricate the creaky gears of the film’s construction. Though he closely adheres to his mentor Errol Morris’ predilection for bold visual whimsy, Kohn fails to achieve the poetry of the master. In The Thin Blue Line, for example, reenactments of the Rashomon-esque telling of the story vary subtly depending on the teller’s perspective. Late in Manda Bala, we watch kids play in the streets of a housing development named after Senator Barbalho--one of his many convenient election-time “gifts.” At first the boys seem to be playing an innocent game of cops and robbers, but soon they are mimicking the ear-cutting motions of the grown-up professional kidnappers we have learned about. The scene would function marvelously in Kohn’s climactic musical montage of suffering if it didn’t reek of a heavy-handed opportunism not dissimilar from the wicked politician’s.

Shocking images of bloody ears being cut-off both by doctors and kidnappers cleverly imply the cyclical workings of what the film posits is the nature of Brazilian society. In this way, repeatedly, the film essentially reduces the crisis to be, as the tagline hails, a case of the rich stealing from the poor and the poor stealing back from the rich. This is all the substance the film has to offer, and Kohn revels in the plethora of ways it can be stressed. The final shot of the film is of millions of tadpoles circling around in a whirlpool of water before going down the drain, a cute metaphor that firmly strikes the last nail on the coffin.

Almost everyone interviewed in the film is flanked by translators who replace subtitles by repeating what has just been said for the English-speaking audience. This is yet another nod to Professor Morris, who used the gimmick with Gorbachev for comedic effect in an Academy-Award sketch. Here the trick further alienates the viewer from the big picture by stilting the dialogue with those involved and subjugating them to the foreigners’ immediate gaze.

Throughout, corruption and violence are offered up in a near total vacuum, where the absurdity of truth is amped up for the purpose of entertainment alone. This is in great part due to the awe with which the stories and characters are shown, the sheer quantity of them, and the satisfaction the film derives from the gory details, often visual, all of which strip away meaning from the bigger picture.

The film portends to be journalistically investigative simply by showcasing the tragedies of people entangled in distinct layers of this societal collapse. Yet it fails to explore anything other than a superficial connection between the dots. The role of the police as an apparatus of repression, a remnant of the military dictatorship, as well as the well-known corruption of the police force would have served as examples of the blurry trajectory and density of the crisis. When asked why he omitted this element of the story by an audience member after the screening, Kohn replied that the main officer profiled in the film was a “family friend,” and that he couldn’t have touched on the subject. The film constantly overlooks the narrative behind the stories, always pointing to the next absurd account as a reason for the previous, taking us in a reductive fatalistic cycle that is the film’s premise and doing an injustice to the real calamity of the situation.

Toward the end of the film we are given a frenetic history lesson in order to draw an obvious parallel between Brazil’s slavery past and its current class woes. This serves as some last minute duct tape attempting to hold together the crumbling structure of the film, and highlighting the neglected contextual framework of the subjects presented.

Other filmmakers have managed to successfully explore similar themes. José Padilha’s 2002 documentary Bus 174 deals with the socio-economic troubles of Brazil by exploring one individual’s trajectory from street kid, drug addict, bus hijacker to victim of state violence, and, as though looking into a microscope, piecing together a narrative example and shedding some light on various facets of a complicated problem. Kátia Lund and João Moreira Salles’ News From A Personal War, another documentary interested in the surging violence of Brazilian society, dissects the chaotic situation in Rio’s slums via the perspectives of the police, the drug dealers and the dwellers, offering a historical analysis of each in order to untangle the present situation. Manda Bala, in contrast, is interested only in the stories that, like supernovas, outshine their host galaxy, blinding the viewer from the surrounding milieu. Unfortunately, these mindless explosions are entertaining to some.