The Brazilian film The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao opens with the sublime beauty of nature — we see sunlight streaming through the leafy green trees, water filtering through a rocky incline, a light-blue sea with a barely perceptible mountain ridge looming in the horizon, salamanders scurrying across rocks, and monkeys clambering up branches. Everything seems tranquil, almost Edenic. And then, as in Genesis, human beings come along, and everything devolves into chaos.
The first two human beings we see in Invisible Life are not a man and a woman but two women, sisters, making their way through this paradisaical forest. “Euridice!” one of them calls out while peering through the leaves to glimpse Rio de Janeiro’s famous soapstone sculpture of Christ perched atop a grass-covered mountain. They are looking for but aren’t quite able to find each other. It takes the audience some time, too, to figure out exactly what is going on in this touching, occasionally frustrating, but ultimately rewarding film. But when we eventually do, we sense that the journey has been worth the effort.
Based on the novel of the same name by Martha Batalha, and with a screenplay by Murilo Hauser, Ines Bortagaray, and Karim Ainouz, Invisible Life premiered at Cannes in 2019, where it took home the top prize in the un certain regard section of the film festival. It has now been released on Amazon Prime. The film follows two sisters, Euridice (Carol Duarte) and Guida (Julia Stockler), who grow up together in the repressively patriarchal Rio de Janeiro of the 1950s and later try to make their separate ways in life. Euridice harbors hopes of becoming a great pianist and would like to audition for the renowned Conservatory of Music in Vienna. Guida dreams of love and marriage. During their youth, they laugh and tease each other on their beds about boys and borrowing their grandmother’s earrings for dates.
In her teens, believing she has found love, Guida elopes with her boyfriend to Greece, angering her traditional-minded father (Antonio Fonseca) and separating herself from her sister. Things in Greece, however, do not go as planned. The man she married, as she writes to Euridice, turns out to be a scumbag. And so Guida, now pregnant, returns home to her enraged father. “You are no longer my daughter,” he tells her, giving her a wad of cash and telling her to vanish through the backdoor.
As he kicks her out of the house, Guida’s father lies to her, telling her that Euridice has gone off to Vienna after having been accepted into the conservatory. This does Guida yet another disservice by furnishing her with the illusion that Euridice is living out her dreams, when in fact, she has gotten married and settled into a staid, bourgeois existence. Guida is forced to raise a child alone, in poverty, without even the support of her sister or mother.
At the same time, Euridice, the aspiring concert pianist, has gotten pregnant, putting her career and most ardent hopes in jeopardy. She contemplates having an abortion, which is not only a very difficult thing to do in 1950s Brazil but also, as a friend reminds her, “a sin” that God will punish her for — all the while believing that Guida is in love, living somewhere “very far away.”
Other than a few unwelcome glimpses of the male anatomy, this is a rather aesthetically pleasing film. It is a delight to the ears, from the calming trickle of the rainforest water to the musical cadences of Brazilian Portuguese to the evocative keys of Chopin’s études. And visually, it is filmed with a painterly touch. As my mother rightly pointed out, director Ainouz must have studied Henri Matisse because so many of the shots in this film are of women standing near open windows and balconies, a favorite motif of the great 20th-century French fauvist. Other compositions, such as one of Euridice at the piano, flanked by her father and two other men, conjure Matisse’s The Piano Lesson (1916). (Matisse, whose son Pierre Matisse was a piano player, was fond of painting boys and girls playing the piano.)
Ainouz also appears to have studied Stanley Kubrick. This is not a Kubrickian film by any stretch, but some of the shots, particularly one near the beginning of the film of Stockler standing near a balcony, framed by azure-blue drapes, recall Kubrick’s use of bright blues, neon reds, striking contrasts between light and dark, and neoclassical symmetry in Eyes Wide Shut. Other shots, including a Christmas dinner scene with Euridice and her father, are also rather splendid, with the festive lime greens and apple reds of the holiday running across the living room and the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree mirroring the lights of the Rio skyline at twilight.
The writing, however, is at times a bit strange and oddly phallic-focused. There are a few too many gratuitous mentions, at least for this reviewer’s taste, of “hard hoses” and “hard members” — and far too much full-frontal male nudity. “Mai kulei hai?” as the Talmud would say. Why, exactly, do we need all this? At other times, the writing feels overly rigid — “I’m pregnant.” “That’s wonderful!” “I’m not supposed to be pregnant now” — unwilling or unable to plumb the depths of what is really occurring in the sisters’ psyches. Yet Guida’s and Euridice’s tortured, confused, yet ever-hopeful facial expressions and the poignant melodies of Chopin make up for the occasional silences of the script. So do astute lines of Brazilian folk wisdom, such as, “Family is not love, it is blood” — or, even better, “Poor people do not have time to go insane.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
