The Killer

Title is actually "El Matador". So "matador" means "killer". Apt, but somehow I would not have thought it would translate to that.

I had to take a chance on a Brazilian Western, because why not? It's framed as this unassuming looking guy and his two sons telling a story to these two dangerous guys they find in the woods. A story about a gunman named Cabeleira. He was found abandoned as a baby by a hired killer called Seven Ears and raised out. Eventually Seven Ears leaves and doesn't return, so Cabeleira goes searching for him. It turns out all the things he learned about hunting, tracking, and killing, make him a good gun-for-hire, for the local hotshot landowner, a Frenchman named Blanchard.

(I can't help noticing that the bad guy in a Western in a country colonized by the Portuguese is French. It's like making a Western set in Arizona where the greedy landowner is Chinese, or Russian or something.)

It's not a happy movie. Most anyone who shows kindness dies. So it's perhaps fortunate that life is too hard for many people to show kindness. The closest the movie has to a hero is an old man named Sobral, whose wife and son were killed by Blanchard's goons because he wouldn't sell his land. Seeing that the government agents sent to stop this aren't interested, he kills them, takes their uniforms, and basically decides to do it himself.

Too bad he forgot what Tuco the one-armed man in the hotel.

The storyteller makes a big deal about how the precious stones (the tourmaline paraiba) can curse a man who becomes obsessed with them. Blanchard, Seven Ears, Cabeleira. I thought the thing that could have been more relevant was that Seven Ears supposedly taught Cabeleira to only kill what he intended to eat. Cabaleira seemed to have forgotten that entirely, considering how much of his money he spends on fucking women at the brothel.

There's not really a payoff to the idea of the stones being cursed. I guess things end badly for Blanchard, eventually, and Cabeleira must have died at some point. But we don't see either death, don't see how their lives were left in ruin.When Blanchard dies, he's still a rich man, and he presumably died quickly of a gunshot. Yes, his rapist of a son had died earlier, but we don't really see him destroyed by grief over that. I suppose the argument is their greed tainted their souls irreparably, but that doesn't really do anything for the people who are suffering and dying at their hands, right now, you know?