Sitting Bull

NEON BULL (C+) - Rarely have I struggled to connect with a lovely little film than with this quiet story of a Brazilian vaquero with a bull-wrangling rodeo show who dreams of being a costume designer.

I think I got that sentence correct. We follow Iremar (Juliano Cazarre) and a crew who support the competitions in which men on horseback chase bulls around the ring, with the object being to grab the animal by the tail and flip it on its back. Behind the scenes he banters with pals, including the exotic dancer Galega (Maeve Jinkings) and her precocious daughter, Caca (Alyne Santana), who is casually treated like an adult much of the time.

The movie barely hangs together as a string of vignettes, with Iremar indulging his compulsion to create outfits, including one worn at the beginning and end of the film by Galega that includes a bull's head. Many of the scenes -- shot in a mix of documentary style and lush set pieces -- explore sensuousness and sexuality, whether involves the bulls or the people. Caca plays in a trough of feed like it's a sandbox; Galega sits in the driver's seat of her pickup truck, legs on the dash as if she's at the Ob/Gyn so can groom her pubic hair; the gorgeous white bulls bump and jostle among each other in the bed of a truck driven by Galega.

The proceedings crescendo with a magnificent love scene between Iremar and a pregnant woman in a vast costume-manufacturing warehouse, shot in lusty shadows by writer-director Gabriel Mascaro and cinematographer Diego Garcia ("Cemetery of Splendor"). The two men have created a luscious palette of sights, sounds and touch. But it's difficult to find a way into the story. If you didn't read the plot synopsis ahead of time, it will take you a while to figure out what this is about. Even with a cheat sheet, this one can be enigmatic.

But others loved this film, including:

• New York Times: "Neon Bull is a profound reflection on the intersection of the human and bestial."
• Village Voice: "No matter how rigorously worked out each shot and its action might be, Neon Bull always honors the chaotic looseness of everyday living — the way that, unlike in the movies, few of the moments we inhabit seem to be about just one thing."
• Slant Magazine: "Everything in the film is understood to be a subsumed sex act, with actual sex serving as a contextualizing catharsis."
• A.V. Club: "Writer-director Gabriel Mascaro doesn’t really have a story to tell about these folks, but he does have a wealth of almost documentary-style detail to share, plus style to burn, and that’s nearly enough."
• Hollywood Reporter: "Instead of a straightforward narrative arc for the small cast of characters, the film -- gorgeously shot and framed ... -- combines a documentary-like look at their everyday lives with a fascinating if not entirely clear-cut exploration of body and gender issues." 

It's hard to tell whether this whole experiment -- which also involves a scene of a horse being masturbated to harvest its sperm -- isn't just one big wank.