By LUCIANA MOLINA*
Commentary on three film adaptations of Clarice Lispector's work
1.
I start with a truism and ask the reader to be indulgent with the text and not abandon it. It is very difficult to adapt Clarice Lispector to the cinema. As soon as Lispector entered the Brazilian literary scene, she was compared to supposed European similes. James Joyce. Virginia Woolf. Marcel Proust. Someone could suggest the American William Faulkner. Nothing resembles it. Anything.
Clarice Lispector's literature takes place at a crossroads that mixes narrative, prose poem, philosophical essay... all of it filled with incandescent allegories, which cross the text in various directions. What differentiates it from foreign similes is that sometimes the narrative is just a thread holding the text together by the skin of its teeth. From the constant danger of getting lost in the non-narrative, the text turns into a full-blown experiment with language itself.
The problem for anyone who dares to adapt her work for the cinema is to get carried away by just one of the aspects of the text, removing important ingredients from Clarice Lispector's fine literary alchemy.
We can take as an example the case of star hour (1985). Despite being well-intentioned and with some successes, Suzana Amaral's adaptation transformed the film into a superficial and flat narrative, depriving it of Macabéa's rich subjective life, in addition to completely eliminating the metalinguistic tensions woven from the narrator's existence. Rodrigo SM Perhaps this occurred due to possible confusion between star hour and the social novels that Clarice Lispector uses to construct her pastiche.
It is in the contradiction constructed between the petit-bourgeois narrator and the northeastern retreatant that we find one of the most provocative features of the text. While Clarice Lispector's work is one of the greatest events of Brazilian modernism, the adaptation of star hour It is a conventional and charmless narrative.
2.
Yes, The passion according to GH (2023), recently shown in cinema, goes to the opposite extreme. In a format reminiscent of an essay film, the work reproduces tics often associated with a type of “art cinema”, which, precisely because they are so common in this medium, end up not bringing the necessary distinction to the constitution of an artistic personality.
This is partly explained by the track record of its director. Luiz Fernando Carvalho was very successful in making the film adaptation of archaic farming. Raduan Nassar and Clarice Lispector share a certain lyricism. By adapting the first, Luiz Fernando Carvalho managed to transform the poetry of the original into cinematic poetry.
But this does not happen in Passion according to GH. Due to excessive attachment and fidelity to the original text, he is unable to get rid of Clarice Lispector's words. The film could hardly be more wordy. And, as a result, the meaning and feeling contained in the original word is lost. The result is boring, pompous, very cumbersome.
Some objections can also be raised to the way he interprets the few social elements that appear through the cracks in the text.
Recent readings by Clarice Lispector evoke the tension between the boss GH and the employee (in fact, a tension comparable to that between Rodrigo SM and Macabéa). In the film, the interpretation of this issue led to questionable decisions regarding the characterization of the GH character and the mise-en-scène, which suggest an upper-middle-class woman walking through her sumptuously decorated apartment.
The film deliberately seeks to accentuate the contrast between the light-eyed boss and the black maid, without this leading to an accurate representation of social and existential aspects within Clarice's aesthetics. The confrontation with otherness and the unknowable is an element that frequently emerges in Clarice Lispector's prose. But, with him, there is also an enormous desire for empathy and understanding – observable in the ambivalent figure of the aforementioned Rodrigo SM, who loves and repels Macabéa.
Furthermore, it seems to construct a false dichotomy between the protagonist's existential and metaphysical elocubrations (which, in this context, seem simply derived from a futile and idle luxury) and the practical life of the domestic worker. The tension between theoretical life and practical life gave way to an excessively watertight dichotomy in Carvalho's work.
A friend, also a Clarice Lispector enthusiast, confided in me that he thought the adaptation of The passion according to GH very cheesy. There are many elements that refer to bad taste in this film. But it doesn't seem to be a thanks to stylized and deliberate (which perhaps saved it from its excessive solemnity).
Maria Fernanda Cândido's performance is sometimes exaggeratedly theatrical, as if she were reciting Clarice Lispector at a poetry soiree in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro. Sometimes it refers to those humor sketches that mock the intellectuality of Rio's elite and that pop up in the feed of social networks. It's like reading Veja about the enchantment of a socialist who discovers the work of Albert Camus. The character seems to have been generically characterized as a heroine of the nine o'clock soap opera. Globo who sometimes reads “sophisticated novels”.
We see the actress impeccably made up and with sparkling earrings for Close excessive on her beautiful face. We notice, when the camera opens, that it uses a dressing gown and moves around his classically decorated apartment. It's almost a caricature. At her worst moments, it seems like Maria Fernanda Cândido is part of a TV commercial. Probably an earrings or shampoo commercial. Aiming for excessive refinement, the result was tackiness and affectation derived from the ostentation of the rich.
Furthermore, the structure of the cinematographic work was left adrift. Everything revolves around Clarice Lispector's text being recited in a very artificial way. From my point of view, this created a huge disconnect with the protagonist. The film sounds like a boring digression.
Perhaps we can say that one of the greatest strengths of Clarice's prose is the establishment of an identification with the interior landscapes of his literature – which makes all his enthusiasts feel close and intimate to the text. In other words, the lack of connection and empathy with GH in the film sounds like a fatal error.
In short, I would found a Church for Clarice Lispector, but I could barely bear the two hours of adapting The passion according to GH.
3.
With this, I argue that the subject matter of Clarice Lispector's works was never the serious and solemn, but rather the trivial that exists in the experience of the first kiss, the desire to read a book, the admiration for roses or the chance encounter with a cockroach.
About two years ago, the adaptation was shown in cinemas. The Book of Pleasures (2023), directed by Marcela Lordy. The novel is also not one of the easiest works to adapt among those produced by the writer, but the result sounded better to me. He's happiest trying to adapt Clarice Lispector's different ingredients.
Lóri is shown as an art teacher who enjoys a comfortable apartment in Rio de Janeiro thanks to her family inheritance. Like GH, she tries to uncover human passions and pleasures in their relationships with others. As a single middle-class woman, Lóri alternates between emotional-sexual encounters and moments of solitude. There are also some successful adaptations to contemporary issues in the form of nods to the Brazilian political situation. The film even makes better use of the Rio setting, showing it not only as the expected landscape of a middle-class apartment, but also in the simultaneously familiar and peculiar aspects that fill the days.
In this sense, it seems to me that in adapting An apprenticeship or The book of pleasures there is a better understanding of the Claricean style and themes than in the other two, which are lost when they choose to follow only one of the facets of the complex material that serves as their source. In Clarice's work, after all, the epiphany, the dive into metalanguage and subjectivity do not occur in opposition to the prosaic and the mundane. Quite the opposite: it is precisely from unsuspected everyday life that intensities emerge and erupt.
*Luciana Molina She has a PhD in Theory and Literary History from Unicamp. Currently, she is a Portuguese Language and Literature teacher at the Espírito Santo State Department of Education.
the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE