Neon Bull
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''Neon Bull'' () is a 2015 Brazilian
drama film In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. The drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular ...
directed by Gabriel Mascaro. The film premiered at the
72nd Venice International Film Festival The 72nd annual Venice Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, was held from 2 to 12 September 2015, at Venice Lido in Italy. Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón was the jury president for the main competition. French-Italian actress ...
and won the Horizons (Orizzonti) - Special Jury Prize. It was also shown in the Platform section of the
2015 Toronto International Film Festival The 40th annual Toronto International Film Festival was held from 10 to 20 September 2015. On 28 July 2015 the first wave of films to be screened at the Festival was announced. Jean-Marc Vallée's ''Demolition'' starring Jake Gyllenhaal and N ...
, where it received an honorable mention from the jury. At the 31st
Warsaw International Film Festival Warsaw Film Festival (; WFF), also known as Warsaw International Film Festival, is an annual international film festival held every October in Warsaw, Poland. The 40th edition of the festival will take place from 11 to 20 October 2024. Histor ...
it received the main prize of the International Competition, the Warsaw Grand Prix.


Plot

Iremar (
Juliano Cazarré Juliano Cazarré (born 24 September 1980) is a Brazilian actor and writer. He appeared in more than thirty films since 2002. Biography Cazarré is son of the juvenile writer and journalist Lourenço Cazarré, winner of the 1998 Jabuti Award. H ...
) is a bull handler, working for a traveling group who transport bulls from rodeo to rodeo, who dreams of becoming a tailor and making fashionable clothing for women. He finds an outlet for his creativity making custom horse masks and provocative outfits for Galega (Maeve Jinkings), the group's driver who also performs sexually enticing dances for groups of men after each rodeo. They are accompanied by Galega's daughter, Cacá (Alyne Santana); and Zé (Carlos Pessoa), a buffoonish bull wrangler who is the butt of the other's jokes. The film deals mainly with the interactions between the members of this group, interspersed with Iremar's attempts to design clothing, and rodeo scenes. After an attempt by Iremar and Zé to steal valuable horse semen from a stud auction goes awry, Zé is offered a new job as a horse wrangler; he is replaced in the group by Junior (Vinícius de Oliveira) a young, attractive, and vain, but kind, man who befriends Cacá and becomes sexually involved with Galega. During a rodeo, Iremar meets Geise, a pregnant woman selling cologne and perfume from a large factory where she also works as a nighttime security guard. After the rodeo, Geise brings a bottle of cologne to Iremar as a gift. Later, at night, he visits her at the factory, where he is impressed by the industrial clothing machinery. She seduces him, whereupon they engage in sexual intercourse.


Cast

*
Juliano Cazarré Juliano Cazarré (born 24 September 1980) is a Brazilian actor and writer. He appeared in more than thirty films since 2002. Biography Cazarré is son of the juvenile writer and journalist Lourenço Cazarré, winner of the 1998 Jabuti Award. H ...
as Iremar *
Maeve Jinkings Maeve Jinkings Melo Silva (born 4 August 1976) is a Brazilian actress. Early life Jinkings was born in Brasília, Brazil's capital, the daughter of a merchant and a photojournalist. At the age of five she moved with her mother to Belém, Pa ...
as Galega *
Vinícius de Oliveira Vinícius de Oliveira (born July 18, 1985) is a Brazilian actor. Biography Vinícius Campos de Oliveira was born on July 18, 1985, in Bonsucesso, Rio de Janeiro. He was raised by his mother, Juçara, along with an older brother and two younger s ...
as Júnior * Alyne Santana as Cacá * Josinaldo Alves as Mário * Samya De Lavor as Geise * Carlos Pessoa as Zé * Abigail Pereira as Fabiana


Production

In the scene where
Juliano Cazarré Juliano Cazarré (born 24 September 1980) is a Brazilian actor and writer. He appeared in more than thirty films since 2002. Biography Cazarré is son of the juvenile writer and journalist Lourenço Cazarré, winner of the 1998 Jabuti Award. H ...
had to manually stimulate a horse, he was sure that Gabriel Mascaro had planned to use a prosthesis. Instead, when the director told him that he would have to actually touch the horse's penis, he refused to continue unless Mascaro did the same first. So in the end they both did the act. The genuineness of the scene in which
Juliano Cazarré Juliano Cazarré (born 24 September 1980) is a Brazilian actor and writer. He appeared in more than thirty films since 2002. Biography Cazarré is son of the juvenile writer and journalist Lourenço Cazarré, winner of the 1998 Jabuti Award. H ...
had to have sex with Samya De Lavor, who was really 8 months pregnant, is disputed. Mascaro asked Cazarré to have an erection at the beginning of the scene. Cazarré said the sex was simulated. Director Mascaro said he was standing far from the action, so he could not see and he did not ask the actors how they performed it, but he admitted the result "is very persuasive" and done in only one take. More, talking about the camera position, he said that "The sex scene with the pregnant woman, if we were one step ahead, it would become a totally porn film".


Release

The feature film had its first worldwide screening on 3 September 2015, at Venice Festival. Its first Brazilian session took place at the Rio Festival on 4 October, where it won four awards. The film reached the Brazilian commercial circuit in January 2016.


Reception


Critical response

''Neon Bull'' earned critical acclaim upon release.
Review aggregator A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews and ratings of products and services, such as films, books, video games, music, software, hardware, or cars. This system then stores the reviews to be used for supporting a website where user ...
Rotten Tomatoes Rotten Tomatoes is an American review aggregator, review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee ...
gives the film an approval rating of 88% based on 50 reviews, with an average rating of 7.1/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "''Neon Bull''s hypnotic visual poetry occasionally borders on exploitation, though its reflective nature softens its animalistic gaze." On
Metacritic Metacritic is an American website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created ...
, the film holds a score of 80 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". It is ranked at number 60 on the "Best Movies of 2016" list.


Accolades


References


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Neon Bull 2015 films 2015 drama films 2010s Portuguese-language films Brazilian drama films 2010s Brazilian films