MY HINDU FRIEND: A Misanthropic Curtain-Call
“What you are about to watch is a story that happened to me and I present it in the way I know best.”
This is the statement with which Héctor Babenco opens his film My Hindu Friend. It’s a superfluous preamble to a film presented in the leisurely, circuitous manner of an anecdote told over a long lunch. We quickly understand that the director has cast himself in the shockingly gaunt form of Willem Dafoe—dropping dubious bon mots in the face of a devastating cancer diagnosis. Dafoe, one of our greatest living actors, has here undergone the sort of self-mortifying physical transformation we’ve been conditioned to associate with an “important performance.”
As the film’s sole non-Brazilian star and likely the only native English speaker of the cast, the film—which is in English—seems reverse-engineered from Dafoe himself. A small universe of characters revolves around him, speaking in wooden expository dialogue, existing only to exalt or (temporarily) thwart our protagonist. Several female characters throughout the film cannot help but immediately perform oral sex on Dafoe’s director character Diego, his apparently legendary status as a Great Artist casting a powerful spell over them despite his ghoulishly abject appearance. This conspires to create a surreally hermetic experience, as if we’re viewing the world only through the warped lens of Diego’s narcissistic perceptions, like the central character in Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa—the profound loneliness of the one “real person” in a world populated by automatons.
The explicit personal link presented by Babenco at the start leads us to consider whether we’re meant to take this all at face-value as self-aggrandizing or if the repellently self-regarding figure of Diego is a knowing self-criticism. This is unmistakably Babenco’s stab at an 8 1/2-style personal opus, with the director’s avatar name-dropping Fellini halfway through the film as well as distinctly Fellini-esque flights of fancy awkwardly inserted periodically throughout the film.
The key difference between the protagonists of each film is that the unlike 8 1/2’s Guido, who exhibits exhaustion with his own appetites and self-obsession, My Hindu Friend’s Diego appears self-satisfied to the very end. And why wouldn’t he be? Nearly everyone he encounters appears utterly in awe, if not charmed by him—including the figure of Death himself. I don’t require a morality tale, though. If this is to be the story of an unrepentant asshole who treats others with contempt and comes out (relatively) on top, I’m happy to give it credit for realism.
I referred to the occasional fantastical scenes as awkwardly inserted but in a film where characters are prone to uttering lines like: “This is Diego’s brother, to whom he has not spoken in 10 years … Diego blames him for their father’s death,” it’s a welcome reprieve to be given these generally dialogue-light sequences. The lighting becomes more expressive and cinematographer Mauro Pinheiro Jr.’s gorgeous, painterly work is allowed to shine. If their inclusion is jarring, it’s only because they are so much more engaging than the rest of the film. Dafoe, looking vampiric, and perforated with medical paraphenalia in a dark hospital room, crooning “Cheek to Cheek” into an intubation tube or deliriously wandering the night streets to a neon-soaked nightclub—there are precious morsels of visual poetry to leave you wanting more. Hell, Dafoe’s face is a marvel unto itself. More is conveyed in allowing the camera to linger on those gleaming eyes and the dark hollows beneath the cheekbones than any amount of his valiant reckoning with the dialogue.
My Hindu Friend, completed in 2015, was Babenco’s final film. He was taken not by the struggle with cancer dramatized here, but by a heart attack at the age of 70. It’s a frustrating final statement in the way that only something with occasional sparks of brilliance can be. There are images that linger with me, as the dull stretches that string them together fade into obscurity- but isn’t that just the way life is? My Hindu Friend will receive a week-long limited theatrical release in select cities starting 1/17.
