A Paixão Segundo G.H.

If you're looking to simply watch a movie to accompany your popcorn, avoid this masterpiece. The Passion according to G. H. goes much further. It is a dense and existential cinematic experience, built from the encounter of two masters of fictional narrative: Clarice Lispector and Luiz Fernando Carvalho. Exciting!

I was very impacted.

The film is as vigorous as the book. I was looking forward to watching a film based on a book so loved by me. It was very surprising and I felt touched every second of the film. It is a work in itself, a very strong creation, as is Clarice's literary work. The face, eyes, and mouth of Samira/Janair, the images of the insect, and the splendid Maria Fernanda/GH will remain forever in my memory. They are images of a cinematic vigor that go beyond the aesthetics of beauty, elevating cinema to a universe of flaming, ancestral, and organic drive. In this way, the film imposes a new, innovative paradigm that fills a gap in the Brazilian film scenario: a new perspective on the director/interpreter relationship. Starting from GH, the creation of the interpreters goes beyond what Bergman, Fassbinder, Bresson, Glauber, Antonioni... who loved and took care of their actors.

Carvalho, perhaps using processes that mix languages such as those of Grotowski or Stanylavsky with others of his cinematic culture (actors Studio), establishes a unique creative energy, an Improvisational, epidermal ritual, of affection and friction in relation to images. An aesthetic amalgam between the filmmaker and the actress seems to reveal itself at the moment the scene is made, in the passion for ethics of bodies, in the enchantment of performance, in improvisation as a counterpoint to the conventions of naturalistic interpretation, transforming the actress into a co-author of the cinematographic work. All the other elements that make up and structure the narrative will be dragged by this amalgam that transmutes any and all objects, space, or time into the body. In the film, everything is body: the scenography, the costumes, the photography, the music, the montage. All are interconnected in a fluid and deep movement as a Being that presents itself through a single body. In the countercurrent of the language of classical cinema, the filmmaker provocatively places himself in the territory of the actor/actress as a starting point in his creation process that seeks to transmute film into the body, transforming the invisible into the visible and vice versa. The director and interpreter put themselves at the service of the spirit/ synthesis of a literary work and, therefore, the film is not configured as a simple adaptation, revealing itself as a powerful transfiguration.

As I watch GH, I hear that everything is sacred, imbued with the experience of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the mystery that both repels and attracts.

And it is in this space where sacredness (capable of communing with the impure) prevails, that I see the happy meeting between Clarice, Luiz Fernando Carvalho and Maria Fernanda Cândido emerge.

An unclassifiable experience! Exciting! Unique! Radical and necessary! Thank you!

Maria Fernanda Cândido's character holds the viewer's hand to drag you down into a trip of self disconnection. She dances, reflects, cries and crawls through a thousand emotions, she turns herself into so many characters in her search for herself.

This piece is a stunning impersonation of author Clarice Lispector's romance in first person, a piece that seems impossible to bring to a screen when you read it, but Luiz Fernando Carvalho magestically worked it out. Through a portrait perspective and a monologue that prances through the expectations of high class Brazil, the "passive" role of women, racism, poverty, disgust and otherness.

The Passion According to G. H., a Clarice Lispector's novel considered by many to be an "unfilmable" work, becomes a revelation in the hands of the director Luiz Fernando Carvalho and of the actress Maria Fernanda Cândido. It is a masterpiece in which images and music intertwine with the text in such an organic way that we realize they were born from the same source: from the Art that springs from the depths of the soul. The great and talented actress Maria Fernanda Candido achieves a level of excellence in this wonderful, powerful, strong, delicate and sensitive work, with the impeccable aesthetics of Luiz Fernando Carvalho.

As I write this text... The film is still in cinemas across Brazil. There are those who say that it's nothing more than an "audiobook version" of Clarice's book, there are those who get up in the middle of the session and complain on social media... Simply, disagreements, that's life. But there are those who find cinema and in cinema a version of themselves stamped on G. H.'s via crucis. And feel a film made of human material in every pore of the actress and director. Speaking of LFC, if this film that was considered "impossible" to be filmed comes to life now, it's because passion has transformed into love that can be found.

First of all, it's important to talk about the book that inspired the movie. Is has the same name and it's by the greatest female writer in Brazil, Clarice Lispector. Lispector is know by a extremely poetic and philosophical writing, that created complex characteres, such as G. H

When i was watching the movie i couldn't escape from the feeling that this work reminds me of the earliest stages of cinema. In theses stages, trying do prove itself as value as teather or paitings, cinema would copy these arts. Creating some kind of reproduction of them, as the cinema didn't have its own soul and esthetic found yet.

G. H is a monologue with two hours of extension. What we see in the movie is a long and lonely speach, as we don't have other people talking. This is speach is made in a closed format, that takes only the center of the screen. This closed format works in a way to prevent you from drifting from the character, as we don't have anywhere else to see.

This movie has great acting and a beautiful direction of art and photography. But at the same time it doesn't has a reason for it's existence. Is wasn't capable of finding a exterior motive, besides the book, to work this story in a different media. It's not really a different media, is a ilustrated performance that would work better a teather maybe.

The ideia of beautiness being the reason to justificate the quality of a work of cinema, even a work of art, it's the ideia that we overcame in the past. If the text is better in the book, if the acting reminds teather monologues, why would a movie exist just to be beautiful?