Denise Garcia’s initial motivation behind Sou feia mas tô na moda (hereafter I’m Ugly But Trendy) was music. Back in Porto Alegre, the southern capital where she lived till 2000, Ms Garcia had experienced music as bringing together people from different backgrounds and social classes. Moving to Rio that year she realized that despite talk about social and racial miscegenation in what has been construed as the national genre par excellence, samba, things no longer worked that way in the cultural capital of the nation, if they ever did. That was the time when such poor and more often than not black girls as MCs Vanessinha Pikatchu and Tati Quebra-Barraco were emerging from the favelas. Vanessinha, whose epithet may be construed as an infantile allusion to the male organ, stating that she wanted “to go to the shopping mall” rather than “stay at home washing piles of dishes”; Tati, whose epithet may be translated as the Do-It Girl, saying that:
I spent three months not doing it.
I’m ugly but I’m trendy.
I’m now able to pay the hotel for men
And that’s what matters.
Do it with me, do it with me!
The immediate reaction Vanessinha and Tati faced from newspapers, magazines and television was outright rejection. “The feeling I got then was that those girls weren’t supposed to use their knowledge, their experiences in the music they made, which means they weren’t supposed to express themselves.” Her feelings of empathy turned into complicity, Ms Garcia decided to make a movie. She phoned the Do-It Girl, called on for an interview and spent one year in and out of the favelas, going to bailes funk all over Rio.
Dwellers of Brazilian slums are not unused to the foreign gaze, ever in search of glimpses into a harsh reality that, since the samba is samba (i.e. since the thirties), parades itself as a wellspring of Brazilian authenticity. Evidence of this fact: Aracy Côrtes’s wonderful 1932 Columbia recording of Assis Valente’s “Tem francesa no morro” (“There’s a French Lady in the Slum”), entirely sung in pidgin French. And although historians of Brazilian popular music would be hard pressed to find one single samba dealing with the visit of a beachfront dweller to the hills on whose slopes most of the favelas rest, accounts of the problematic descent of the slum dweller into the beachfront are not uncommon: see for instance “Cabaret no morro” (“Cabaret in the Slum”) by Herivelto Martins (Odeon, 1937) or “Mulato antimetropolitano” (“Antimetropolitan Mulatto”) by Laurindo de Almeida (Odeon, 1939), both performed by Carmen Miranda.
How have the people of Cidade de Deus (City of God) reacted to Ms Garcia’s visits? “Since the beginning I was welcome, probably because I was one of the first women they saw that could speak Portuguese, was interested in them and was Brazilian like them.” No one ever hinted that she should request drug dealers’ permission and Ms Garcia sensed that she was allowed to do her job as long as she was honest to the people involved and herself. “If you see the ones you are documenting as people just like you, you are in a good direction.”
A big fan of Ramones, Ms Garcia sees funk carioca as the local avatar of the punk spirit. The roughness of punk is certainly a trait of funk carioca. Much to the filmmaker’s regret, however, it is also a trait of her movie: Ms Garcia strove to get funding from local companies. Their replies were invariably the same: “we do not wish to see our name associated with bailes funk.” I’m Ugly But Trendy was made with no money at all. So much the better: just like the subjects it portrays, the film bears the scars of undeserved poverty.
So far as one can judge from the documentary results, in the favela, honesty is the best policy. The level of empathy between Ms Garcia and the dwellers whose everyday life she records is amazing. As a result the viewer is brought into intimate contact with people whose trust he or she might only be able to conquer after much labour if at all. Returning from excursions to fields into which few of us would venture, Ms Garcia brings back the marvel of a music in the making. And we hear funk carioca as it has never been heard before, not even on the most forbidden of pirate CDs. MC G3 opens the film singing a cappella against the silent backdrop of a massive wall of loudspeakers, thus connecting the equipes de som (sound teams) of Rio to the Bronx block parties of the seventies and the Jamaican sound systems of the sixties in a refreshingly colloquial way. A vocal improvisation to the accompaniment of handclaps by a group of friends connects funk carioca to the Brazilian traditions of repente, samba de roda and partido alto while establishing a link between these traditions and the proto-rap of The Last Poets. Deise da Injeção sings a cappella in her front yard while Ramona — a transgender — performs an overly explicit choreographic act… Ms Garcia is every musical ethnographer’s object of desire!
While filming, Ms Garcia was unsure what the end product of her efforts would be. Anyway, the funk acts she was working with remained collaborative and open. She believes it was only on watching the film at the classy Odeon cinema in Rio that they realized what she was up to. “In my film there is no sociologist or anthropologist to explain the funksters’ words; they talk by themselves.” In her view, their reaction to the Rio première testified to her success: “they were happy and loud during the whole session”.
Denise Garcia (far left), Bonde das Danadinhas and MC G3 (far right) after the Odeon première of I’m Ugly But Trendy in the Rio Film Festival, 2 October 2005
But is I’m Ugly But Trendy really a film where funksters speak by themselves? Of course not! If this were true Ms Garcia would not be a movie director. The reality she presents is a highly contrived one. Rather than a film about funk, I’m Ugly But Trendy is a film à thèse, a film about sexual explicitness as a means to women’s empowerment. This inversion is explained in the following lines of Elizabeth Wood and Philip Brett’s entry on lesbian and gay music for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 2001):
Music, especially popular music, often seems to respond in its playful, coy or disruptive tactics around the vocal as well as visual representation of sex and gender (consider Madonna, Prince or Boy George) to Judith Butler’s notion of these supposedly natural characteristics as “performative” utterances (i.e. like speech-acts) to which subjects submit in a constrained repetition as part of entry into language and society. Butler proposes the notable inversion in which “if a regime of sexuality mandates a compulsory performance of sex, then it may be only through that performance that the binary system of gender and the binary system of sex come to have intelligibility at all” (Butler in Abelove, Barale and Halperin eds 1993: 307–20). [*]
The world of funk carioca moves fast and leaves few footprints behind. If on the dance floor all human beings shine with the transcendental beauty of their trance of joy, in 2007 the sight of women who do not even remotely conform to accepted ideals of feminine beauty taking to the stage to shout their readiness to engage in the most outrageously wild forms of sexual intercourse has all but vanished. Ms Garcia documentary remains a tribute to this possibility. I have watched it countless times. I have watched countless times youngsters watch it. The memory of their faces remains as vivid as the memory of the film’s finest moments: alert, their bodies projecting from their sits, their eyes wide open, their faces smiling in wonder at a culture that all but a few seem intent on keeping away from them.
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[*] Cited from the unexpurgated original version available online in the Electronic Musicological Review, <http://www.rem.ufpr.br/REMv7/Brett_Wood/Brett_and_Wood.html>; Judith Butler’s article cited from H. Abelove, M. A. Barale and D. M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, New York, 1993.
