The Son Of A Thousand Men Review: It Reinvents The Idea Of A Family In Its Magico-Realist Tale

“The Son of a Thousand Men” is a magic-realist piece of art directed by Daniel Rezende with a radiating heart that recently premiered on Netflix. Very often, to describe a surreal piece of work, we resort to adjectives such as “radiating,” “poignant,” and “ethereal”—but can language truly define the essence of its events moving beyond what we have set as conventional? The answer leans towards negative. Like any other piece of magic-realist work, “The Son of a Thousand Men” too defies being contained into language, but what it throws at us is a series of images, a collection of jumbled-up human relations, and a legacy of pulsating emotions that lives through a thousand reincarnations of men. Based on Valter Hugo Mae’s nearly unfilmable novel “O Filho de Mil Homens,” the film is a quest for human connection, found families, and kinship that defies the constraints of flesh and blood.

At the center of the story there is Crisostomo, a lonely fisherman living at the edge of the village, who decides to look for a son one day after being overcome by his increasing loneliness. His quest leads him to find a son in Camilo. The non-linear narrative shifts in time and space, breaking chronology and creating an alternate history that traces every character till they form a family. The town by the sea is strange; not strange in the way that feels uncanny like the town in “Pedro Paramo,” but strange like how Marquez’s Makondo felt in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” I can definitely see an intertextuality of themes in how Maria, Isaura’s mother, is obnoxiously obsessed over her daughter’s virginity that echoes the chastity locks in Marquez’s novel. In a way, all magic realist narratives become a treasure trove of archetypes—the archetypes that are in play here are of ostracization and marginalization based on one’s sexual preferences (what we see in Antonio and the tale of the woman who was punished on a pole) and crossing over a forbidden line set by the society. While a part of the film constructs it in how Francisca is dehumanized because of her dwarfism, and Antonio is beaten and abused because of his homosexuality, the resolution of the film deconstructs it. Crisostomo’s cabin by the sea is a sanctuary; like all roads leading to Rome, many of the society’s “strays” find a home there. 

Crisostomo’s conception (yes, calling it that as the light enters him through his genitalia and inflates his stomach) of Camilo becomes an event that defies normativity. First of all, even though symbolic, it is a human male’s act of conception shown on screen—a man who procreates without a feminine force at play; the last time we had seen anything like this was in “Frankenstein,” and it went horribly wrong since Victor always focused on excluding the feminine. With Crisostomo, the tale is exactly the opposite. Camilo’s arrival (following the dream sequence at the beach) is only an inception point. Camilo is a living thesis of the theory that it takes a village to raise a child. After his arrival, his primary need is for food—of jam and fish—but it soon escalates to needing a mother’s affection. One by one, Isaura, and then Antonio comes in. Then follow Mathilde and Mininha—and soon Crisostomo’s cabin, once filled up by the company of a rag doll, is bursting at its seams with human presence. It feels like misaligned stars have found their own constellation, teeming with the light of a thousand people before them who had died quietly in their loneliness. 

The film is a politically strong take on homosexuality, and the subject keeps returning as a recurring motif. Much of the ostracization is borne out of sexual preferences; Francisca is looked down upon by her neighbors because of her active sexual life despite her dwarfism, Anthonio is called a “fairy” because of his inclination towards men, and Isaura is considered “unclean” by her mother, who does not hesitate to check her virginity with a two-finger test. These acts of violation wound the characters, pushing them right to the margins, until they build a home there. The unit that Crisostomo, Camilo, Isaura, and Anthonio make in the end is what an unconventional family dynamic looks like. The bonds are not defined by societal roles but emotional tethers. 

While telling a story about kinship, the film also draws from elements of absurdities. Maria develops a strange French accent as soon as her daughter is engaged and starts feeding on animal droppings and drinking perfumes. This may seem incredulous at first to those who are unfamiliar with the genre, but with the right leap in suspension of disbelief, one slowly starts to realize that the absurdities are just an alternate way of looking at the familiar emotions of denial, of forbiddenness, and of violence. 

For a magic-realist film as such, the images are what propels the narrative forward. It feels like a collection of old photographs reanimated, with just the right fade that makes them look pressed inside an album. There are shots of crashing waves on a rocky shore, of endless starry nights, and of busy, carnivalesque marketplaces, which define the emblematic magic realism. Rodrigo Santoro’s Crisostomo is a character with a palpable heart—and his journey from being a lonesome man to a father who can wrap his hands around his found family is heartwarming. His initial stiffness of a recluse evolved into his bold assumption of a warm-hearted partner and father that sinks under the skin in the most beautiful way.While the film carries Crisostomo and Camilo’s central arc, it also branches out multiple times, creating micro-narratives. In a way, the film becomes the living reality of the village; it feels like a long walk in the dusty roads, taking a peep into every household across space and time and, for a while, being a witness to their stories. The singularity of the film lies in its multitude. This is definitely one of those adaptations that makes the transition of medium from the written source text to the film look seamless and magical. I would definitely suggest that you watch this film—not with the intent of tracing a beginning, middle, and end, but with the intent to enter a story and come back with a fuller heart that you cannot quite define.