A Paixão Segundo G.H.

Just watched yesterday (Saturday) at a film festival Luiz Fernando Carvalho's second feature, 22 years after "To The Left of Father", his first feature. Before starting, suspect of any other extensive review considering this film "a masterpiece", comparing it to works of filmmakers known strictly to cinephiles such as Godard, Pasolini, Antonioni, Bergman and others. Summarizing in a few words: two hours straight of endless speech by the female lead and boredom. Almost the whole movie is shown in pan&scan aspect ratio (or 1:33 aspect ratio), the bored woman looking straight to the camera while speaking, crying, smiling. Endless blah, blah, blah on nothing. Sometimes alternate with B&W moments. Only very few moments to highlight: the maid, a young black woman, drawing in her bedroom's wall; the bored female lead destroying the drawings at the wall; and the close-ups of the living cockroach and its bleeding lymph. The director shot his own foot with his new feature. This movie is not for healthy and normal people. Not recommended.

The endless monologue of the main character became tiring already in the first few minutes. Me and my friend both fell asleep at the cinema within 10-15 minutes and woke up from a scream of the main character. Monotonous shots of her inside her flat rambling through her existential crisis. It is supposed to be philosophical and artistic but is primarily boring. It might work as a book, but as a film, it lacks everything. Even for sleeping, because of her sudden scream. Two hours wasted, do not make the same mistake. One of the biggest disappointments I have seen in cinema. It had a 7.9 rating here when I checked, I see now that average was based on too few reviews to take seriously.

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!

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.

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.