Burning Betrayal is all neon polish and no story, a thriller that forgets its heroine

The film opens in a São Paulo soaked in neon green. Babi (Giovanna Lancellotti) rides her motorcycle through the streets with a man behind her, and the chase ends in a place Decider describes as part Fast and Furious hangout garage, part steam-filled factory from an ’80s action movie. They kiss. Then she wakes at her dining table, wine glass half full, laptop open, sample flowers and pastries scattered around her. The dream gets the lighting and the engines. The morning gets a laptop and a tray of pastries, and the film never narrows that distance.

The wedding she is planning is to Caio (Micael Borges), her partner of five years and, by Decider’s account, her business partner too. He comes home, pins her to the sofa, and the whole thing is over almost before it starts. Caio is also facing trial for money laundering. Ready Steady Cut places Babi’s first sight of the judge at that trial, and the judge turns out to be the man she has been dreaming about. He is Marco, played by Leandro Lima. The same critic notes that the chemistry between judge and fiancée is stronger than anything Babi shares with her intended husband. I agree, and it is the one thing in the film that never needs explaining.

The betrayal of the title lands at her bachelorette party. As Ready Steady Cut tells it, Babi learns there that Caio has been cheating on her for two years and had planned to marry the other woman while keeping Babi as his wife. That discovery could carry a drama on its own. This film files it away and sends its heroine somewhere else. According to Heaven of Horror, she gets back on her motorcycle, dyes her hair dark and joins a bike club. Marco becomes her lover on her terms, which means purely sexual and no relationship. For a while that reads as a woman choosing what she wants over what a would-be husband expects of her, and it is the best idea in the film.

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Then the film loses interest in her. Ready Steady Cut says it turns into another Fifty Shades of Grey, with montage after montage of Babi and Marco together and no story attached. They grow closer, but Marco chooses not to let her into his life, and the script keeps us out with her. Freitas directs with plenty of ideas and no order among them, the jumbled quality that same reviewer names. The sex scenes come too often and are shot through the male gaze. The nudity is gratuitous, in that critic’s word, and the scenes themselves are by the numbers. Ready Steady Cut adds that even if they are meant mostly for Babi’s pleasure, they don’t work at all. I’d go a step further: when the third montage arrives, nothing has changed between the two characters, and that is the real failure.

Lighting is where Freitas puts his energy. Decider says he has a fetish for dramatic lighting and far less control over tonal consistency and coherent storytelling, and the neon-green opening bears that out: the style is applied to the story rather than drawn from it. Everyone on screen is also extremely fit, men and women alike, and Heaven of Horror points out that they wear very little. The same critic finds the production quality and the locations gorgeous. I won’t argue. The film is handsome, and it wants you to look at places and bodies for most of its running time. It does not ask you to do much else.

The supporting cast gets less. Camilla de Lucas plays Patty, whom Decider sums up as never not horny as a hundred goats, and that one-line description tells you how much room the film leaves her. Bruno Montaleone’s Thiago wears tortoise-shell glasses and a polo shirt in a world of leather and motorcycles, in Decider’s phrase. Heaven of Horror supplies the rule that governs films like this one: when every other man is dark, tall and brooding, the soft-spoken one in glasses is the one to watch. That critic’s verdict that none of the twists is shocking suggests how little the film does to disguise its machinery.

The crime plot gets the same treatment. Decider reports an oversight hearing about a criminal organisation posing as a construction company, with details so vague and unimportant that they can be shelved until the plot needs to speed up in the last twenty minutes. Heaven of Horror lists criminals, stalkers and friends who turn out to be villains, and finds none of it shocking. Ready Steady Cut goes further and calls the picture a lacklustre thriller with a predictable ending. The mystery tag on the film is generous. What it has is a legal subplot that arrives late and leaves nothing behind.

Lancellotti has to hold all of this together. She plays the dreamer, the fiancée and the woman who rides off on her own, and her decision to leave Caio’s expectations behind is the one thread that still holds when the montages take over. Lima has the harder job. Marco is a judge defined by what he withholds: he offers his bed and keeps the rest of his life to himself, and the script gives the actor little to play beyond that reserve.

Heaven of Horror forgives the film because it never pretends to be more than it is, and places it beside Basic Instinct, Fifty Shades of Grey and the Polish Netflix title 365 Days. As a description of the genre that is fair. But this adaptation of Sue Hecker’s novel O Lado Bom de Ser Traída starts from a woman finding out she has been lied to for two years, which is a better story than the one it ends up telling. Freitas trades it for a string of beautifully lit bodies. Burning Betrayal looks polished, and its opening dream is the only stretch where the style and the story want the same thing. After that it leaves the betrayal behind for the bedroom.

Cast

Photos: The Movie Database (TMDB)

Tags: Netflix, dramas, Giovanna Lancellotti, Burning Betrayal, Camilla de Lucas, Diego Freitas

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