Loneliness coalesces into desperation in Karim Aïnouz’s Love for Sale, which begins and ends on the desert road outside a small Brazilian town where opportunity appears as unknowable as snowfall. Hermila (Hermila Guedes) comes to visit her aunt, Maria (Maria Menezes), and grandmother, Zezita (Zezita Matos), with her young child, and after it becomes clear that her husband may have abandoned them, she embraces the affections of a former paramour, João (João Miguel), while entertaining the possibility of prostitution.
Aïnouz and co-writers Felipe Bragança and Mauricio Zacharias do not milk Hermila’s crisis for cheap pathos. But while she may come to her decision as calmly as the hammocks that swing beneath the silhouette of trees that dot the neighborhood, there’s still sadness to the way her face sinks as she calls herself Suely for the first time and sells one of her lottery tickets to a man, declaring that the prize is no longer a bottle of whiskey but “a night in paradise.”
Aïnouz is deeply but unpretentiously attuned to the rhythms of small-town living, and in the way he casually captures Hermila’s grandmother throwing a blanket over the girl, only a short time after the old woman slapped Hermila senseless upon learning of her planned prostitution, he shows a sweet regard for the needs of the quotidian. That the characters all have the same names as the film’s actors is indicative of Aïnouz’s quaint pretense to realism.
Indeed, watching a wonderful Guedes, whether it’s hinting to the motorcycle-riding João about her lottery sexcapade, almost as if she were trying to come out of the closet, or trying to haggle with a man about when he should pay for her physical services, is to witness a miraculous synergy between an actress and her art. What Hermila is looking for is never clear throughout Love for Sale, but as a blast of trance music evocatively guides her out of town, it’s evident that she will essay her happiness completely on her own terms.
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