There were two sisters in 1951 Rio de Janeiro, Guida (Julia Stockler), eldest at twenty, and Euridice (Carol Duarte), two years younger and more cautious about life than her sibling. She wants to become a concert pianist and has been practicing these past few years to an expert level, so it is her dream to study at a proper establishment and take her talent as far as it can go. However, her parents would prefer if she simply settled down with a nice man who could give her kids to look after, and she is reluctant to go through with those kinds of duties. But Guida is even more rebellious, and one night without telling her parents she elopes to Greece with a sailor she has met in a nightclub. So who made the best decision?
This was a tale of two lives in parallel, and both under the yoke of societal expectations that they do their best to buck, though the conclusion was rather more depressing than uplifting: not to give anything away, but it was not exactly an uplifting film once you got down to it. Co-writer and director Karim Ainouz had tendencies here that indicated he wished to smash the patriarchy, but he did not do so by depicting an era when that was in any way possible, as fifties Brazil was very much entrenched in conservatism and family first traditions that saw to it that there was no way either of these lead characters had a snowball's chance in Hell of finding personal contentment when the odds were so heavily stacked against them from their birth.
Mind you, you could say that about plenty of places in the middle of the twentieth century and there was nothing especially unique about Brazil's misogyny, even now. Nevertheless, to see it shown up here with almost every line of dialogue from men aimed at the women being so barbed with disdain and disapproval did wear the audience down, and the suffocating nature of Guida and Euridice's dilemmas was vividly portrayed. The problems really start when Guida returns to the family home nine months pregnant, the scales having fallen from her eyes regarding the lothario she fell for and hoping to pick up where she left off. Her mother is emotional to see her, but her strict father is revolted and practically barges her out of the door, informing her in no uncertain terms that she and her "bastard" will never be welcome in his home again.
He even goes as far as ensuring Euridice never finds out that Guida is back in Rio, therefore despite them living in the same city, they have no notion of how the other is doing, and it doesn't matter that Guida writes her sister letters, because their father refuses to pass them on. Ignorance certainly is not bliss here, and Euridice's story is no less of a letdown as she does get married, to a bloke who is nice enough but not exactly supportive unless it's about her being his wife and mother to their children. When she protests that she still wants to be the concert pianist she dreamt of since her youngest days, he is not exactly abusive, but his "what about me?" attitude is indicative of a selfishness he identifies in her but is actually in himself. Sexually explicit occasionally, this is full of passive aggressive exchanges when it is not being outright aggressive: when the sisters' father observes after a family dinner organised by Euridice that her mother took years to become a good cook, the air is charged with the menace of repression. But Ainouz overplays his hand, and it comes across as unnecessarily cruel on his characters in its present day wrap up. Music by Benedikt Scheifer.
