By EUGENIO BUCCI*
Fernanda Torres didn't win, but she is the greatest of all. Nothing is bigger than Hollywood, nothing is bigger than the Oscars. Nothing, just Fernanda Torres.
Of course I watched the Oscars. Sunday night, Carnival far away and I was on the couch, in front of the television. Of course I got bored with the torrent of cheesiness, but it wasn't that much. Of course I exploded with football excitement when I'm still here, by Walter Salles, won best international film. Of course I turned off the show in anger when they didn't give the best actress award to Fernanda Torres. I thought it was an insult, even though I had never seen the film by the other actress who was called to the stage. I don't even know her name. Of course I turned the TV back on. I even heard the girl thanking me. Of course I didn't like it.
What is not clear is the rest. It is worth an article. Walter Salles did not dress up with a tuxedo. He preferred a simple black suit. A fine print without colors. On Monday, his tropical smile topped by narrowed eyes made the front pages of the newspapers. I applauded again. He deserves the highest honors of the Republic. He is a hero of culture.
Starting with literature. His film gave worldwide impetus to Marcelo Rubens Paiva's book, a work stitched together in light lyrics and poignant memories, even when hilarious. The passage in which the writer portrays his mother, Eunice, secretly pouring national whiskey into bottles of single malt Scotch is priceless. Priceless and poignant.
We read it with pleasure and regret. We smile. After the forced disappearance of her husband, the Paiva family became impoverished, but the lady of the house did not hesitate. To keep the house in good spirits, she offered her friends suspicious drinks, yes, but within an image of imported luxury. She lost her income, not her pose.
The scene with the containers does not appear in the film. It is not necessary. The Eunice who does not bend is there, whole, beautiful, alive and brave. The interpretation given to her by Fernanda Torres, that more than brilliant artist, rekindles the courage that repression did not destroy and reconciles us with the history of Brazil that Brazil wanted to forget. I hear that the film reversed the inertia of state bureaucracies and brought tears to the eyes of some people who had no idea what the military dictatorship had been like. I listen, I believe and, once again, I applaud.
Cinema, as art, touches the soul. As entertainment, it moves crowds. As I'm still here It is art and, whether we like it or not, it is also entertainment. It has changed mentalities that had already become petrified within the alienated walls of the country – the walls that have no ears. The Oscar race filled the audiences with self-confidence and the authorities with opportunistic excitement. So much the better. Eunice became the name of a federal government award.
Clues to the whereabouts of Rubens Paiva's body are beginning to emerge from the darkness. The unpunished torturers are becoming restless. They will be left to fend for themselves. I hope so. An honest film is worth more than a thousand demagogic rallies. I'm still here, alone, accomplished what tribunes and publicists, together, could not.
This is all good, but it is disturbing and somewhat destabilizing. No country should depend on the Oscars to know its rights and love its democracy. No country, not even the United States. No country, much less Brazil. But that's how it is. A feature film, the kind that the average viewer would watch on the weekend, before eating pizza, or even after, has come to restore our sense of nationhood, the memory of human rights and the thirst for justice.
We are a world integrated by the market, in general terms, and by entertainment, in specific terms. This means that the altar of entertainment, that is, Hollywood, concentrates the power to pontificate on what is legitimate and what is nothing more than a chimera. It is by eating popcorn in the dark that we learn to distinguish right from wrong, the comic from the tragic, the acceptable from the abominable. The emotion that is bought at the box office is the criterion of truth.
We are a civilization that believes that everything that happens only happens to move us. If it moves us, it exists. If it doesn't, it can go in the trash. We are insatiable consumers of reality, as if it were an aesthetic object or a bag of popcorn. Our politics have become nullified, debased and pitiful. Our religion has become disenchanted. Entertainment has replaced it with inhumanity, merchandise and technology. We are a civilization that recognizes itself in entertainment.
Mass melodrama has replaced incendiary pamphlets and mystical narratives. Churches have become TV shows. Autocrats, from Hitler to Goebbels, want to control the entertainment industry. Hollywood is the new Mecca, the new Rome, the new Delphi. The Oscar ceremony is the pulpit that defines anti-Semitism (or haven't you seen the very long speech by Adrien Brody, winner of the best actor statuette for The brutalist?), the two-state solution on the same piece of land in the Middle East (with the floor, Yuval Abraham, director of No other land,winner in the documentary category) and the evils of the military dictatorship in Brazil (in the voice of Walter Salles).
Fernanda Torres didn't win, but she is the greatest of all. Nothing is bigger than Hollywood, nothing is bigger than the Oscars. Nothing, just Fernanda Torres.
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of Uncertainty, an essay: how we think about the idea that disorients us (and orients the digital world) (authentic). [https://amzn.to/3SytDKl]
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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