JOGO BONITO
Notes on Onda Nova
well! that was not what i was expecting
was gonna have a quiet sunday evening but then a friend told he wasn’t gonna be able to go make it to a vidiots showing he had tickets to. “queer brazilian soccer movie,” he said, and i had nothing better to do so i went. that was the entirety of what i knew going in.
he wasn’t wrong. “queer brazilian soccer movie” is absolutely accurate and yet that doesn’t come close to describing what i watched. ondo nova is an underdog sports movie, a self-aware goofy sex comedy, a softcore flick, a coming-of-age narrative, a celebration of queer identity, and a bitter and haunting look at what it means to live in conservative 1980s brazil. it has wider tonal swings than anything i’ve ever seen before. it has everything.
it’s like… gregg araki x john waters x cine de ficheras x bad news bears x skinemax
this was my first time at vidiots and the experience of watching this in their micro theater was very much part of the bizarre nature of the whole thing. 20 people shoulder to shoulder in a room smaller than a walk-in closet watching a five-minute sex scene in 4k. the move as always is to try to adapt a stately disinterested academic gaze, but under these circumstances i’m pretty sure i only reached “rigid discomfort.” you could feel the temperature rising. what a experience.
the movie was banned by the brazilian dictatorship for “being immoral” and wasn’t released until it fell a few years later lol
the actual plot is pretty straightforward: onda nova is the story of brazil’s (rio? sao paolo?) first women’s football team. women playing soccer was outlawed under the brazilian military dictatorship of the 1940s— like outright outlawed on the basis that it was harmful to their health and status as reproductive agents— and the ban wasn’t lifted until 1979. the movie is about a ragtag young friend group of girls + gays that gets recruited to become a soccer team, receiving training from a local soccer coach and traveling to other cities to take on other women’s squads.
kinda funny as a sports movie, because while the setup and training hijinks are intimately familiar to anyone who’s seen the bad news bears or the benchwarmers or any of a million movies where ragtag underdogs Become a Team, onda nova’s not at all interested in the actual competitions themselves. there’s a rough pleasant appeal to how bad most of the actual actors are at soccer, they’re just doing whatever out there
the one exception is potato, who can actually ball out and looks like messi compared to everyone else on the field
sadder and more… idk , haunting isn’t the word but maybe honest about the dark side of being a beautiful free uninhibited queer youth in early 80s brazil. some relationship insecurity stuff stemming from the free love/swinging vibes is addressed frankly and honestly and leads to a suicide attempt (that is then pretty quickly moved past, but still). the final scene of the movie contains the strongest example of this, a sequence where two gay guys have sex (under a revenge of the jedi poster), one accidentally (?) kills himself playing russian roulette, and then his partner wanders the streets wearing only a leather miniskirt, coming by first the women’s soccer stadium where he can’t enter bc the women are in the middle of a game and then a pickup game in a random field, where he joins in. genuinely a stunning bit of moviemaking that serves as a microcosm for the whole film: desire, destruction, despair, and soccer rising above it all.
quick hits
everybody is so so beautiful and so so tan lol. crazy tan lines on everyone, men included
soundtrack is so insanely stacked i assume the filmmakers just threw whatever on there and didn’t bother trying to clear stuff. did not expect to hear bowie’s five years
there’s some 80s brazilian soccer players who pop in this film playing themselves, wiki says they helped fund the picture, which is cool
caetano veloso’s in it too, making out with a girl in the back of a taxi
tangential but interesting to watch this after the world cup. saw some “why can’t the usmnt be like the women’s team,” and like yeah no shit the uswnt was historically dominant, title ix led to massive spikes in ncaa women’s sports participation while soccer was outright banned in other countries. no surprise the usmnt lost that dominance within a couple decades after the other traditional soccer powers started taking women’s sports seriously