Jornal da Mostra
“Suely/Suely in the Sky”, by Karim Aïnouz
Nº 429 > 29ª Mostra > 05/09/2006
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Edição:
Renata de Almeida e Leon Cakoff
Edição:
Renata de Almeida e Leon Cakoff
SUELY IN THE SKY
Karim Aïnouz reveals “Suely”, his second feature film, to the anxious audiences at the 63rd Venice Festival, where it was shown at the Orizonti screening. The film takes one in a trip to the Ceará hinterlands, a land where only human richness seems to exist. The most remarkable richness of the Brazilian people, created by the great migration movements and by the resistance of the ones who have to stay. The deepest signs of this private history are the absence of the father figure, and sometimes also of the mother, when children are left to be raised by their grandparents or other relatives.Suely will be the alternative name for the character Hermila in the adventure of a migrating woman going back to settle down in her own land. She had tried fortune in São Paulo, the dream to make America for many Brazilians. She comes back with a few months old son, after a long bus ride. In her house there is neither reference to a mother, who also left one day, nor to a father, who seems to have never existed. But Hermila wants to fill these gaps. She says she will settle down, form a family, and she is only waiting for the promised arrival of the father of her son, which will never happen.
Hermila will become Suely to escape again with her restlessness, and will repeat the tale of her scattered family and the migration cycles, without degrading herself, with dignity. Even though she ends up raffling off her body. I am not prostituting, she thinks, it will happen only once. Only enough to earn a small amount, pay for a new bus ride, this time to go further, to the far south of the huge Brazil of opportunities.
What Hermila raffles off is “a night in heaven”. Or “Suely in the Sky”, as suggested by the English title. The sky and its fullness, the earth and its indifferent dryness, remind one of the sceneries created by the great Mexican master of cinematography Gabriel Figueroa. The arid nature’s inspiration gives Aïnouz’s film the dimension of linearity, a perspective that seems to allow one to see how far each of its characters will be able to go. It is from this dimension that Suely wants to escape to go back to being Hermila, even if she repeats her mother’s history, who left her behind one day, to be raised by her grandmother.
Karim Aïnouz thinks this is a very different film from his first one, “Madame Satã”. It was thanks to “Madame Satã” that actor Lazaro Ramos was able to show his dramatic power. The director repeats the deed with another young actress, Hermila Guedes. Besides being an excellent actor’s director, Aïnouz is also an excellent screenplay writer, having given his contribution to other great moments of Brazilian cinema – “Movies, Aspirin and Vultures /Cinema, Aspirina e Urubus”, by Marcelo Gomes; “Lower City /Cidade Baixa”, by Sérgio Machado; “Behind the Sun/Abril Despedaçado”, by Walter Salles.
All films above have called the attention for offering audiences such human richness, such resistance force, that is seldom seen in the movies. We can see the good lessons learned from the Iranian neo-realism of Abbas Kiarostami (being very private to be universal), readapting themselves to Brazilian landscapes. And the eye that best registers these overwhelming discoveries, of the human and humanist universe, is the one by American photographer Kirsten Johnson, who followed Karim Aïnouz in this inner journey of universal dimensions. The film’s cinematography is by Walter Carvalho, a master of lighting in many Brazilian movies. But all the still pictures of the making of the film are by Kirsten Johnson, a rich ethnological register of Brazilian hinterlands that she wants to last also as a photo book. This is what is always deserved by great films like “Suely”.
Translation into English: Laura Rebessi (laurarebessi@gmail.com)
