Cinemasparagus: "Mens sana in corpore sano"

Storytelling

Dornelles is maybe best known outside of Brazil as the co-director with his associate Kleber Mendonça Filho of the tremendous Bacurau, which I'll be writing about in the near future. The title of this 22-minute Recife-set film,"Mens sana in corpore sano" [2011], is presented onscreen with quotes, like a maxim, on either side of the Latin expression: "Sound mind in a sound body".

I like this film. A subsequent look might suggest "sound mind in a sound body", a cause and effect spurred by mind and thus body, or the other way around? These are questions at the core of a metaphysics that has captured David Cronenberg's fascination for decades as well. For all the theory being produced around the notion of 'a new branch of film studies' in "Body Horror" (no fundamental ontological breakthrough), Cronenberg's charms lie in force of revelations suffused with the filmmaker's distinct personality and his mischievous charm. He relates yarns. Maybe not the same manner Sam Fuller did, but there's a premise, then an event, and, before any certainty of consequences bubbles up in the spectators' minds' eye, there comes a sense of inevitability directed towards an outcome that itself, though still unknown, seems all but inevitable.

Does body revolt against mind? Mind against body? Does Body deal with contempt for the cogito...? And either way around, what is the entity or force that induces 'impetus'? Whatever the case, or cause, a self-awareness by force or entity presides over the absolute non-awareness of "Mens sana..."'s vanity-intense protagonist and of his taste for a ludicrous extreme of 'fitness to the nth,' i.e., for his work toward utter self-annihilation.

Dornelles shoots the hard-body in pieces large and small. The gym regimen as a phenomenon sets the course for the achievement of total blankness, why that might be desirable or not, who can say. We can project any 'world-spirit' of the current epoch onto these proceedings; in the category of plastic surgery and masochistic self-improvement, a private dancer goes crotch-to-crotch with our main lead the client, the camera/gaze focusing in on the stripper's breast augmentation her bi- and triceps that really let her work the push-ups she's being 'spotted' for. A finality: a man who goes so hard that in the end his severed head 'looks' upon the body mechanically pumping the stationary bike towards no-more-tomorrow. That's an ending that can only be the result of a tale. After all, the magic of cinema resides within Mickey's sparkle; at essence the wonder of the movies reflects the precepts of a story well told. •