Bacurau, and how characters sometimes might not matter?!

I don't know if y'all have picked up on this yet, but I'm really, really into characters. Like really into characters. Characters are the conduit by which I experience storytelling. They give me a human anchor into an unfamiliar world, and, for a little while, they lower a bridge into their lives so I, too, can live with them.

Characterization is often the metric by which I determine how much I liked a movie or show or book. If the characters are weak, my interest wanes. (This is why it's so difficult for me to finish any type of serialized program—especially when it stretches for "too long". As soon as the characters show inconsistencies and plot takes precedence over character development, I can no longer tolerate whatever it is I'm watching. Sorry, not sorry.)

So, when I first finished the movie Bacurau (2019), it left a sour taste in my mouth.

Bacurau takes place in a fictional village named, wait for it... Bacurau. It is "a few years from now", and we follow the villagers after the death of Carmelita, their matriarch. Soon after her death, the village begins to experience strange things: Phone signal, which used to be ubiquitous, suddenly stops; Bacurau, which is usually mapped, disappears off Google Earth. The rest can be explained by the designation of the film as a "weird Western"—a genre that mixes the Western with horror, science-fiction, or fantasy.

But the problem with Bacurau, at least, as I saw it, was that it really doesn't have any characters. Sure, some of the villagers are named, and we open the film following what I thought could be the protagonist—a woman coming home for the funeral of her grandmother. But every character is painted in such a broad stroke that they have no real defining characteristics at all. Left without an anchor in an unfamiliar world—especially a movie whose genre literally has the word "weird" in the designation—I found myself floundering.

There was no protagonist, and although there was a very clear antagonist, he still wasn't a character. There was no individual detail that differentiated one mass from another. Everything seemed to be lumped into villagers vs others. In essence, the characters became these amorphous blobs of us vs them.

That's not enough for me.

I want richness. I want conflict created between the push and pull of the complex motivations of character that fuel their wants and needs. (See more with "Wonder Woman 1984, and why character motivation matters.") I want somebody to anchor my story and tell me what to care about and why.

During a movie club meeting (yes, I am part of a movie club) where we were discussing this film, I brought up the question that burned through my mind through the run-time. Does character development and motivation matter in a movie like this?

The answer from my friends was a resounding "no."

The argument was this: This is a film that relies not on character, but on the monolith of the village. The people in the village identify so strongly with each other, and as a collective, that their individuality doesn't matter nearly as much as it does for, say, those of us who grew up in America. Since identity is more meaningful as a collective monolith, this is how the film treats its characters: as pieces of the collective, not as individuals. And, since the story is told through the eyes of villagers, the antagonists are also portrayed as one-dimensional caricatures. Their identity is shrouded in mystery so they, too, do not matter.

I would dare to say that there are few stories where characters shouldn't matter. I am hard-pressed to think of any story that could be made more meaningful by distancing itself from rich characterization. Stories are part of what makes us human. And what connects us to story are the people who fill it.

Bacurau showed me that sometimes, well, the characters aren't always the most important thing. And they don't have to be. Sometimes, they can serve another purpose altogether.