There is a suspicion that a film about President Lula was not conceived as an artistic enterprise but rather a lavish piece of electoral propaganda, writes TOM HENNIGAN
IT MIGHT not be quite up there with Gandhi’s, but the life story of Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has all the ingredients for a historical epic.
It is the story of a boy born on a small holding in Brazil’s parched northeastern badlands who rose to defy the generals and become his country’s first working-class president.
It is the story of how he fled drought along with millions of others on the back of a jalopy in one of the 20th-century’s great unheralded migrations and after 13 days landed in the country’s industrial southeast, of how after starting working life as a kid selling oranges on the street, he lost a finger in an industrial accident and his first wife in childbirth.
It is the everyday story of millions of nordestinos who stumbled off the trucks that carried them the thousands of kilometres from rural poverty to the shanty towns of Brazil’s big cities.
But Luiz Inacio also joined a union, became its leader and led the strike against a dictatorship that made him a national figure. The generals locked him up but his followers on the outside did not waver. Their victory was another nail in the coffin of a regime tottering towards the exit.
Lula would go on to lose three presidential campaigns after the return of democracy but finally, in 2002, he won and became Brazil’s first working-class hero to put on the presidential sash.
This is where Lula – Son of Brazil ends. The most expensive Brazilian production ever opened on more than 500 screens yesterday and expectations are for it to be an unprecedented hit.
Brazil has never had a president as popular as Lula, never one with whom so many Brazilians identify. His seven years in power have been among the best in living memory and even Barack Obama singled him out as “the man” at a summit earlier this year.
It is just a pity that the film is a dud. The flesh and blood of the real man is wholly absent and Lula emerges saintlier than Gandhi himself. Its release is too late for this year’s Oscars but it would not have been troubling the academy anyway.
Of course Hollywood is past master of turning blockbuster material into turkeys, but there is a suspicion in Brazil that Lula’s film – financed by companies with juicy government contracts – was not conceived as an artistic enterprise but rather a lavish piece of electoral propaganda.
While 2010 is an election year in Brazil, Lula will not run for re-election in October after serving two terms and having declined to join the regional trend of altering constitutions to allow presidents to escape term limits.
But he does desperately want Dilma Rousseff to win. Currently his chief of staff and enforcer, she is in many ways the anti-Lula.
Just as Lula cannot but speak the language of the man on the street, Dilma (first names being more popular in Brazilian politics than surnames) often lapses into the jargon of a Soviet apparatchik discussing five-year plans.
Lula fought and lost a string of elections before becoming president; Dilma has never stood for elected office before now. Both were prisoners of the military, but Lula for leading a popular union strike while Dilma was jailed for her role in a guerrilla group that wanted to take over Brazil and turn it into a continental version of Cuba.
Since then Dilma has won a reputation as a tough and capable administrator, but her debut in electoral politics at the very highest level is a huge gamble by Lula. For it to come off he will need to turn his own massive popularity into votes for her.
His strategists’ plan seems clear – make this election a referendum on his eight years in power and remind voters just who is asking them to vote for Dilma with a film that might leave the critics sneering, but will likely tug the heartstrings of millions of ordinary Brazilian voters.