Neighboring Sounds movie review (2013)

Echoing the melancholic tone of the characters' interactions, "Neighboring Sounds" benefits from a fantastically detailed sound design which, instead of simply reflecting reality, is employed to suggest ideas, feelings and memories -- from the rhythmic beat that follows Francisco's nighttime walk to the growingly louder and tense noise in the elevator during the climax. Moreover, Mendonça is courageous enough as an artist to escape from the realism he adopts for most of the film by venturing, in the third act, into a realm that borders on fantasy -- as in the moment he shows us the nostalgic vision of a man who suddenly sees the street from the perspective of his childhood. In a similar manner, the filmmaker shocks us with an almost subliminal waterfall of blood that suggests a world of suppressed anger and frustration inside the main character. And if nothing else, the sequence in which João and Sofia (the lovely Irma Brown) visit his grandfather is a tribute to cinema itself, transforming an old theater, now taken over by weeds and mold, into a living memory of the past through sound.

Establishing itself as a movie about the desires, anxieties and aspirations of a social class that seems uncertain of its role in the world, "Neighboring Sounds" is also a film about the loss of our roots or, at least, the sad destruction of our history. "The house in which you lived will be demolished," says John to his girlfriend -- a literal piece of information that also works as a metaphor. And so, when the girl visits the place where she spent part of her youth and goes into her old bedroom, we feel the impending loss of a room that, even if extremely common, assumes the contours of a private museum.

When she realizes that the paper constellation she glued in the ceiling remains there and asks her boyfriend to lift her, the gesture emerges as a masterful symbol of someone trying to touch, for the last time, the stars of her childhood's sky before they are torn away by the cruel and inexorable passage of time.

Pablo Villaça is a writer, filmmaker and a film critic since 1994. He's the creator of Cinema em Cena, Brazil's oldest movie website, and one of Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents since 2011.