Breaking Up/Separacoes
Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival
"Love is savagery", according to one of the characters in "Separacoes" (Breaking Up).
Caradecao Filmes/Raccord Producoes/Riofilmes' comic drama is an unflinching look at a sexual roundelay among a group of intellectuals in Rio's contemporary theater scene. Lyrically written and well-acted, the story gets under the skin of its characters and viewers with astute, deeply felt observations.
Brazilian helmer-writer-actor Domingos de Oliveira, a prolific theater director, developed the material as a play with co-scripter and leading lady Priscilla Rozenbaum, and brought his stage cast to the big screen for the low-budget 2002 feature. A moderate art house success on home turf and prize winner at the Mar del Plata Film Festival in Argentina, it screened recently at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival.
With the filmmaker playing Cabral, a fiftysomething playwright and director at the center of a multigenerational story, there are echoes of "Hannah and Her Sisters" -- but, setting him apart from Woody Allen's character, Cabral's self-deprecation cuts far deeper than stabs at humor. De Oliveira doesn't shy away from self-pitying drinking binges and other unattractive responses to marital crisis. Further separating the film from most American romances is its willingness to address the issue of age difference between lovers with a refreshing, nonjudgmental openness.
Almost everyone in the circle of friends is two-timing, including Cabral's gorgeous married daughter (Maria Ribeiro), a younger playwright (Ricardo Kosovski) and the handsome architect (Fabio Junqueira) for whom Cabral's wife of 12 years, Glorinha (Rozenbaum), falls. An actress 20 years Cabral's junior, Glorinha feels increasingly in his shadow and asks for a 40-day separation -- "like Jesus in the desert." Having been a proponent of the periodic time out between them, and a man who viewed the eventual dissolution of his fifth marriage as an inevitability, Cabral, a poet-philosopher who believes "passion is the only cosmic coin we have," quite stunningly falls apart.
But none of the characters, however certain of the rules of the game, is unmoved when the tables are turned. The story is structured around Kubler-Ross' stages of emotional reaction to terminal illness -- denial, negotiation, anger and acceptance -- perceptively applying them to the process of ending a relationship, a kind of death in itself. Avoiding a pat resolution and occasionally stepping back for meta-commentary, 'Separacoes" presents the essential state of human confusion in all its pain and glory.
"Love is savagery", according to one of the characters in "Separacoes" (Breaking Up).
Caradecao Filmes/Raccord Producoes/Riofilmes' comic drama is an unflinching look at a sexual roundelay among a group of intellectuals in Rio's contemporary theater scene. Lyrically written and well-acted, the story gets under the skin of its characters and viewers with astute, deeply felt observations.
Brazilian helmer-writer-actor Domingos de Oliveira, a prolific theater director, developed the material as a play with co-scripter and leading lady Priscilla Rozenbaum, and brought his stage cast to the big screen for the low-budget 2002 feature. A moderate art house success on home turf and prize winner at the Mar del Plata Film Festival in Argentina, it screened recently at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival.
With the filmmaker playing Cabral, a fiftysomething playwright and director at the center of a multigenerational story, there are echoes of "Hannah and Her Sisters" -- but, setting him apart from Woody Allen's character, Cabral's self-deprecation cuts far deeper than stabs at humor. De Oliveira doesn't shy away from self-pitying drinking binges and other unattractive responses to marital crisis. Further separating the film from most American romances is its willingness to address the issue of age difference between lovers with a refreshing, nonjudgmental openness.
Almost everyone in the circle of friends is two-timing, including Cabral's gorgeous married daughter (Maria Ribeiro), a younger playwright (Ricardo Kosovski) and the handsome architect (Fabio Junqueira) for whom Cabral's wife of 12 years, Glorinha (Rozenbaum), falls. An actress 20 years Cabral's junior, Glorinha feels increasingly in his shadow and asks for a 40-day separation -- "like Jesus in the desert." Having been a proponent of the periodic time out between them, and a man who viewed the eventual dissolution of his fifth marriage as an inevitability, Cabral, a poet-philosopher who believes "passion is the only cosmic coin we have," quite stunningly falls apart.
But none of the characters, however certain of the rules of the game, is unmoved when the tables are turned. The story is structured around Kubler-Ross' stages of emotional reaction to terminal illness -- denial, negotiation, anger and acceptance -- perceptively applying them to the process of ending a relationship, a kind of death in itself. Avoiding a pat resolution and occasionally stepping back for meta-commentary, 'Separacoes" presents the essential state of human confusion in all its pain and glory.
- 7/9/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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