Review: Invisible Life, Like its Women, Is Impossibly Bound by Convention

Only rarely does Karim Aïnouz allow for loopholes to refreshingly emerge from the film’s stylistic deadlock.

Invisible Life
Photo: Amazon Studios

Karim Aïnouz’s Invisible Life is a portrait of patriarchy’s ravages—and its pleasure-killing modus operandi—set in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. The film follows the lives of two sisters, Guida (Julia Stockler) and Eurídice (Carol Duarte), whose high-spiritedness and big dreams are cut short by what’s expected of them as women: birthing babies they do not want, marrying men they do not love, and bowing down to fathers who see them as immature versions of their own subservient wives. Little does it matter if they consent or rebel: Being a woman is a lose-lose proposition from the start, the film seems to say, and it only gets worse.

Of the sisters, Guida is the more defiant one. Hoping to get married at a young age, she runs away to Europe with a hot Greek sailor, Yorgos (Nikolas Antunes). And when she comes back home with a broken heart and a baby in her belly, her father, Antonio (António Fonseca), kicks her out of the house for good. Eurídice stays behind, despite her ambitions of being a pianist in Vienna, mourning the sisterly separation quietly for the rest of her life. Guida presumes that her sister has left Brazil to pursue her music career, so she starts sending her letters, addressed to her parents’ home address, hoping they’ll forward the correspondences to Eurídice.

Those letters, which never reach their proper destination, function as voiceover narration, providing Invisible Life with a poetic layer that stands in stark contrast with the contrived telenovela ethos that the film, and Brazilian cinema more generally, cannot seem to shake off. It’s always a question of mistaken identity, face-slapping, madness, and arson (here a piano goes up in flames, of course). And all of that is slotted into the most conventional of aesthetic paradigms, from the over-reliance on classical music for conjuring emotion to the avoidance of aimless contemplation and silence. The truth is that Brazilian cinema, even when its stories call for experimentation, is too often stuck between the contrite drama of its televisual tradition and a devotion to the most classical, and stale, blueprint of American cinema.

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Throughout the film, Aïnouz allows for only a couple of refreshing loopholes to emerge from this stylistic deadlock. One comes when Guida inherits a house from her best friend, Filomena (Bárbara Santos), once she dies. In a queer arrangement of sorts, they had essentially raised Guida’s child together, and having finally inherited something she wanted, Guida sits in front of the house and looks around the front yard, taking it all in. Nuance and ambiguity emerge in the absence of dialogue, music, and narration. Here, we’re allowed to spend time with the character unencumbered by too much mediation by other filmic elements. Is the disowned daughter at last enjoying an inheritance produced by love, not blood?

Another moment where the film breathes is at the very end, when the story flashforwards several decades and a magnificent 90-year-old Fernanda Montenegro, Brazil’s most legendary actress, plays Eurídice. Meaning is, at last, outsourced for viewers to make as we get lost in Montenegro’s face—or is it her many faces?—as she takes over the screen, clearing out the frame from all other unnecessary business. Anything other than Montenegro’s face, or her humble laughter when Eurídice is asked if she used to be a pianist, would feel like blasphemous redundancy. Here, Aïnouz understands cinema as a balancing act of concision, brief unadorned gestures, so everything stops in reverence to Montenegro’s enormity.

This is where Invisible Life should have begun, with Montenegro’s face alone emoting all of the stories that Aïnouz had just spent two hours spelling out. How futile is the word before Montenegro’s presence. The film should also have remained here, in the quietness of elderly Guida’s home, where a whole history of drama is in the awkward lingering of an embrace, and the family’s tragedies are realistic because they’re latent—like letters folded in a safe for which only the son, as it turns out, has been entrusted with the code.

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Score: 
 Cast: Julia Stockler, Carol Duarte, Flávia Gusmão, António Fonseca, Fernanda Montenegro, Maria Manoella, Gregório Duvivier, Bárbara Santos, Nikolas Antunes  Director: Karim Aïnouz  Screenwriter: Murilo Hauser, Inés Bortagaray, Karim Aïnouz  Distributor: Amazon Studios  Running Time: Amazon Studios min  Rating: R  Year: 2019

Diego Semerene

Diego Semerene is an assistant professor of queer and transgender media at the University of Amsterdam.

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