[jsunderland323]

I did too. It felt like there were a bunch of subplots that never ended up tying together. The leg was the most disappointing to me.

My take home at the end was that it was supposed to show the audience that the story was recreated from the parts of the story that could be pieced together by the future journalists. Basically it felt meandering because it was meandering to the journalists trying to figure out what happened. The ending with the son was the journalist trying to tie everything together for herself but he just didn’t have the information. Still dissatisfying.

[greiskul]

The leg is used both as a urban legend that was told at the region at the time, but also as a metaphor. The surrealist scene where it shows the leg brutally attacking people at night: all the people attacked are prostitutes, gays, etc. People that during the dictatorship the police used to just dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.

And it is meant to feel meandering cause that is how this period feels for people trying to study it. There are many cases that we don't know what happened. We just know that the people were killed/disappeared. The perpetrators were never brought to Justice. We are not even sure who the specific perpetrators are in a lot of cases.

This is how the Brazilian military dictatorship operated. There are people in Brazil who want to go back to this period. They say that everything was better. The truth is that a lot of stuff that was bad, was so bad that we don't even have the records to properly reconstruct what happened.

[jsunderland323]

>The leg is used both as a urban legend that was told at the region at the time, but also as a metaphor. The surrealist scene where it shows the leg brutally attacking people at night: all the people attacked are prostitutes, gays, etc. People that during the dictatorship the police used to just dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.

Yeah, so I had to lookup the leg after watching the movie. My interpretation was that it wasn't actually really surrealism. They juxtapose that scene with the lady reading from the newspaper about the attacking leg as if it was real. The reason I think this supports the "from the future journalist's perspective" interpretation is that those were legitimate articles ran, while there were serious cases not being reported on things like people going missing by the dictatorship. I think they included it to show the absurdity of what information was available and what information wasn't in the papers from that time. Also because of the lore of it all.

[zemvpferreira]

That's perfectly nice idea but still doesn't make for a good movie. Making a good movie comes before a nice idea, if a movie is what you're making.

[jsunderland323]

Oh I agree. This was a post-movie rationalization. I think the ending was super frustrating but it was one of those things where after ruminating for a bit, it's like, "okay fine I get it." Maybe, I'm being too charitable to the director. The movie itself was dissatisfying, the reflection on the movie was better.

[jazzpush2]

Your idea of a good movie, you mean to say.

[jacquesm]

> People that during the dictatorship the police used to just dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.

Reminds me of something.