The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao: Brazil's Oscar nom is a feminist lament about sisters separated by patriarchy
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-plus
A stylish melodrama and feminist lament, The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao follows the lives of two Brazilian sisters in the conservative Catholic culture of 1950s Rio de Janeiro. The film - which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and is Brazil’s Oscar nominee - is rendered as a colourful fever-dream with mythic resonance.
The Invisible Life, which was adapted by Karim Aïnouz from a novel by Martha Batalha, focuses on the cruelty of a patriarchal system that separates the sisters over decades. The title character, Euridice, bears the tragic name of the musician Orpheus’ wife, whom he attempted to rescue from the underworld. When we first meet her (played by Carol Duarte), she’s is a dark-eyed, 18-year-old beauty and aspiring concert pianist, who lives with her baker father, mother and her lookalike extroverted 20-year-old sister Guida (Julia Stockler).
Two sisters lead parallel lives, imaging a better life for the other, in The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao
The family lives in relative lower-middle-class comfort, though the issue of marrying-off the daughters is clearly a pressing one for the parents. In an early scene, they have invited a wealthy flour merchant to dinner, with the indirect purpose of showing off their daughters as marriage prospects. But Guida feigns illness as a pretext to slip out of the house to meet a Greek sailor she has met at a nightclub.
Instead of sneaking home through the back garden gate as she promised her sister, Guida sends a letter announcing that she and her new love, Iorgos (Nikolas Antunes), have eloped to Athens.
In the interim, the naïve Euridice is hastily married off to the flour merchants’ dullard son, Antenor (Gregório Duvivier, in a grotesque wedding night. Soon, the piano is rolled down the street from the parents’ home to the new husband’s, where Euridice doggedly pursues her dreams of gaining admission to a conservatory in Vienna.
Months later, Guida, who has been abandoned by her Greek sailor, returns pregnant, happy to be home. But her irate father, Manuel (António Fonseca) and cowering mother, Ana (Flávia Gusmão) tell her to disappear and never return. When Guida begs to see her sister, her father says she is studying music in Vienna.
Conversely, they tell Euridice that her sister is still in Europe and has cut off contact. From that point on, we follow their separate lives, along with voice-over letters that Guida writes to Euridice in care of her mother, though those letters are never received. Guida, pregnant and broke, turns briefly to sex work, and finds an unlikely mentor and guardian in a former prostitute named Filomena (Bárbara Santos). There, despite daily struggles, she finds hope by living vicariously through the life she imagines her sister is living. But Euridice, elated after acing a musical audition, finds herself trapped by an unwanted pregnancy.
The irony is, that each sister imagines and lives vicariously through the other, who they imagine is following her dreams in Europe. Lookalike young actresses Duarte and Stockler, spin their mirror-image lives, while the film teases, and consistently delays a reconciliation. Late in the film, the 90-year-old actress, Fernanda Montenegro, from Walter Salles’ Central Station, has a memorable cameo.
An abundance of style is both the brilliance, and ultimately, a problem for The Invisible Life. The film looks and sounds beautiful -- French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (Happy as Lazzaro) provides the colour-saturated cinematography and the score pulses with the piano music of Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven.
Your reaction to the film depends on your degree of acceptance of the potboiler style of The Invisible Life, dealing with emotional pain through the artifice of high-style, but also depicting sexual scenes with a bluntness that fails to avoid an element of sadism.
The Invisible Life of Euridice Gamao. Directed by Karim Aïnouz. Written by Murilo Hauser,Inés Bortagaray and Karim Ainouz based on the novel by Martha Batalha. Starring Carol Duarte and Julia Stockler. The Invisible Life of Eurydice Gusmao plays at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.