Carlos Diegues’s Bye Bye, Brasil is a muted and low-key ensemble road movie and musical drama about a shabby circus, the Caravana Rolidei, crawling from small town to small town through the Brazilian backwaters to, it seems, avoid a modernity that is crumbling Brazil’s character and ecology. The caravan’s first show presents a medicine-show-like leader, Lorde Cigano (Jose Wilker), who keeps the audience mesmerized with magic tricks; an erotically charged, raven-haired dancer named Salome (Betty Faria) or the "Queen of the Rumba"; and a deaf-mute strongman Swallow, who doubles as a fire breather.
When the troupe adds two more members shortly after the story begins, the strapping young accordion player Cico (Fabio Junior) and his expectant wife, Dasdo (Zaira Zambelli), however, the title Bye Bye, Brasil begins to resonate. Unlike Lorde Cigano, Cico and Dasdo find a legitimate way to mesh the idyllic Brazilian past with its modern Americanized future. Bye Bye Brasil illustrates well the cost of that modernization: ecodisaster, environmental injustice, and horrific exploitation of a land and its people.
Bye Bye, Brasil illustrates these environmental and social horrors by taking the troupe on a road trip through Brazil’s arid, poverty stricken northeast and across the jungles on the trans-Amazonian highway. The repeated shots of television antennae, or what Lorde Cigano calls “fish bones,” provide the first sign of an end to Brazil’s people and environment. Cigano remarks on the fish bones as a warning that villagers will no longer serve as rapt audiences for their show, but they also indicate a move away from nature and towards modern technologies.
That move reaches climactic levels once the troupe reaches the Amazon. Because their audiences have slimmed in villages where televisions have been introduced, Cigano points the caravan toward Amazonia under the advice of a truck driver carrying a huge load of lumber. The environmental degradation of the region is first associated with the trans-Amazonian highway they traverse toward what they hope are villages untouched by technology. As if announcing the end of Brazil’s pastoral past, the remains of clear-cut forests line the road, and a close up of a dead armadillo in the center of the highway explicitly demonstrates the devastation that may occur when a modern world literally rolls over nonhuman nature.
Once the troupe reaches the Amazon, the ecodisaster extends to include indigenous populations in the region, connecting destruction of the landscape with environmental racism. Television “fish bones” have replaced trees in once-idyllic towns, and decadence has replaced the interdependent relationship natives formerly maintained with the natural world. Townspeople boast that they emptied native villages by dropping dynamite and scaring indigenous populations into town, where they are rounded up and flown to Western-owned paper mills in the middle of the rainforest. As an apt illustration of the conflict between nature and culture occurring throughout the film, an indigenous tribe leader and his mother ride with the caravan into town while his mother listens raptly to a transistor radio and dreams of riding a plane.
Ultimately, the film attempts to reconcile Brazil’s idyllic past with its modern Americanized future. Although Cigano loses his caravan and prostitutes Salome in the Amazon, he recaptures his gypsy dream by smuggling illegally mined minerals and earning enough to purchase a larger van and hire more performers to accompany him and Salome. Cico and Dasdo, however, negotiate a less destructive resolution to the conflict between Brazil’s past and future. Unlike Cigano, Cico will not prostitute his wife Dasdo, and in the film’s final scene, they have resumed the musical life they abandoned in their barren village—with a modern twist. In the Brasilia cafe setting of the film’s conclusion, Cico and Dasdo perform to a café audience surrounded by television sets broadcasting their show. Bye Bye, Brazil, then, leaves viewers feeling the same ambivalence toward a devastating modernity faced by Cigano and his troupe.
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