The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao – A Vida Invisível (2019)

Directed by: Karim Aïnouz | 139 minutes | drama | Actors: Julia Stockler, Carol Duarte, Flávia Gusmão, António Fonseca, Nikolas Antunes, Maria Manoella, Gregório Duvivier, Flavio Bauraqui, Gillray Coutinho, Fernanda Montenegro, Cristina Pereira, Bárbara Santos, Marcio Vito

It is 1950. Eighteen-year-old Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and her twenty-year-old sister Guida (Julia Stockler) still live with their conservative parents in Rio de Janeiro. Eurídice’s big dream is a career as a pianist, Guida hopes for the time being to find love.

In the opening scenes we witness what later turns out to be the last intimate moments of the two sisters together. They walk in the lush green hills around Rio’s bays, lose each other. Guida seems undaunted, Eurídice yells her name in panic. A little later, back in their parental home, they chat in their shared bedroom. Guida wants to go out that night with her Greek sweetheart, a sailor passing through, but their father would never approve. So Eurídice has to distract their parents so that Guida can slip out of the house undetected. So far, little too worrying, you’d think. Still, the atmosphere feels ominous.

Maybe it’s the clammy heat, the stifling mores of the 1950s, or the predictive words of the voiceover. “I wish I had never encouraged you to go out that night,” says Eurídice. And indeed, that night will be the beginning of a fateful course of the relationship.

Director Karim Aïnouz, who won the Prix Un Certain Regard in Cannes with ‘The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmao’, says he recognized his own mother and grandmother in the novel of the same name by Martha Batalha on which the film is based (published in the Netherlands as “ The Hidden Life of Eurídice Gusmão”). He finally saw them again in the story that describes the psychologically difficult conditions of women in Brazil in the 1950s (and not just there), which shows what it was like for women to raise a child, find a job on their own. to conform to the wishes of their father or husband, always to others’ expectations, to abandon their own dreams, et cetera.

The story spans the years from Guida’s departure that first night, until Eurídice’s nervous breakdown in 1958. In between, the two young women – unwittingly separated from each other, and each in a very different life course – endure everything a young woman can do. can endure: from unwanted pregnancies to soulless adventures on a café toilet, from lying all alone in childbirth to a cringingly painful and clumsy wedding night. And from men who tell them what they can and cannot do, refuse permission or speak shame of them. But most painful of all: despite (or because of) all the events, their lives remain invisible to the world, as the title reveals. They are interchangeable, just as so many women were before them and after them. Just think of the particularly high number of single mothers that Brazil still has today. Or to all the women who are stuck in a loveless marriage; their youthful dreams tucked far away.

It is precisely this fact, that the lives of these two characters are not that exceptional, that gives the film extra meaning. It also prevents the many dramatic events from affecting the credibility of the film: if it hadn’t happened exactly like that in these two lives, then in all those other women’s lives that this story is also about.

Because no matter how invisible the women are in reality, in this film they are not. Unlike the men—one-dimensional drunks, hotheads, sex-crazed, crooks, bureaucrats, or conservatives—the women here are complete characters, with strengths and weaknesses, with unwise choices but also insane resilience and loyalty.

In ‘The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão’, director Aïnouz has not followed the book to the letter, but he does hint at the written word by having Guida read as voice-over passages from one of her many letters to Eurídice. A smart move to use the letters for that, because this works without being a ‘trick’ – which sometimes seems to be the case with unnecessarily present voice-overs. The same goes for the penetrating camerawork, which more than once almost literally conveys the oppressive lives to the viewer.