I found Vidas Secas to be a very difficult film to watch. It was not entertaining, it was not enjoyable. It had very little aesthetic appeal in a conventional sense. But it was real, painfully real.

I found a review on JSTOR of Vidas Secas. It's author, Randall Conrad, writes that it the film seems to belong more to old styles like Neorealism than to any sort of new wave. I think Conrad neglects that Vidas Secas was a new step for Brazil. Also, that it was only par of the first step of Cinema Novo.

What I thought was most interesting about Vidas Secas was the use of empty frames. The title, "barren lives" seems to be emphasized by a visual motif of emptiness. Often the camera will stay for a few seconds on vast desert without any characters or places or even animals in the shot. Nelson Pereiro Dos Santos use of sound aids this motif as well: void of a traditional score and minimal with dialogue.

The lack of conventional visuals and sounds makes the scenes that do contain action- such as the killing f the parrot or the gambling scene in the town- seem more real and under dramatized.

Despite the fact that Vidas Secas is such a personal film, I couldn't help but feel like the peasant family in the film represented all of Brazil's lower class, in a national political/social sense. Perhaps they even stand for all of Brazil in a national sense. The military (the soldier) and the wealthier class (landowner) are responsible for their grave misfortune-- but they long to be like those members of the upper class (rather than a stable middle class life), on several occasions fantasizing about "leather beds".