By HOMERO SANTIAGO*

Commentary on the film directed by Andrucha Waddington and Breno Silveira, currently showing in cinemas.

1.

What a beautiful film! That's what I thought as soon as I left the screening. Victory, directed by Andrucha Waddington and Breno Silveira.

The steady filming and the calm rhythm, without jerks or flashy cuts, give the narrative a calm that contrasts sharply with the narration. The lack of rhythm generates a tension that builds up until it takes over the soul of Dona Nina, the protagonist masterfully played by Fernanda Montenegro – a formidable detail: well into her ninth decade, we don't know if she is acting or if her staggering gait, monstrous dark circles and caricatured stubbornness are real.

How beautiful all this is! It would only be better if it were a story without the warning “based on real events”. I have no doubt that art has a cognitive function, but it certainly does not reside in the transmission of information. Anyone who wants to know something about drug trafficking, the general horizon of the film, should go read a book or watch a documentary. The real theme of Victory It is not that, but the shattering of a way of life.

After years of working in family homes (with all the horrors that this usually involves in Brazil), Dona Nina saved up and managed to buy a house on a hillside that once looked like “a forest,” as she fondly remembers. But the hillside has become a favela dominated by drug dealers who are right there, on the edge of her living room window and within reach of her curious retinas.

She suffers from the noise, the brutality and, above all, from the shots that pierce windows and even hit a neighbor she loved very much. Her immense suffering is ignored by her neighbors, who quite rightly claim that there is nothing they can do.

Dona Nina's life is slipping away; she can't sleep, she lives in fear; her relationships become impossible: the cashier at the supermarket, with whom she used to talk, is murdered before her eyes; the boy Marcinho, who helped her and shared her afternoon coffee, is taken by drugs, caught in a crime and soon lured into drug trafficking. The worst sadness settles in her soul and takes over everything.

In a film as beautiful as the one from the year before last, Perfect days, Wim Winders narrated the shaking of a carefully forged and cultivated happy routine. In Victory, in a much more carioca than Tokyo way, we don't even reach perfect days nor is the shock familiar: instead of the sudden arrival of a niece, it's about drug trafficking, the police, shootings, human insensitivity, the brutality of everyday life; everything that fractures a life, to the point that it, thrown to the bottom of the well, is forced to react, gathering and mobilizing its remaining strength. This is what Dona Nina decides to do after a decisive episode.

2.

For her afternoon coffee, she carefully selects a cup. She pours herself a cup and sips the liquid with pleasure. Suddenly, a loud bang throws her off balance. Her hand drops the object; the cup shatters; shots come through the window. Immediately, she concludes that she needs to do something. Her first action is to report it to the police station; without success. The police say that there is a lack of evidence. Dona Nina then decides to produce it.

He considers buying a video camera and, after getting information about the gadget, he says goodbye by asking the clerk where they sell “glue everything”. In his head, there is only one thing: put the cup back together, record evidence, save his life. The sequence of steps that give meaning to the story could not be clearer. The narrative course of the film is structured by the attempt to glue the pieces of the cup back together, as if to reconstruct the unity of the soul divided into shards.

However, when everything seems to be going well, the cup will finally be put back together, the complaints are well underway, in short, when life seems to be able to be lived again, the sad surprise comes: the coffee runs through the cracks. The sign is clear. The danger is imminent; it is urgent to do something, to give way to a last and desperate act. Escape.

During the screening, I went back several times to Benedict Spinoza's basic thesis that every thing is one. conatus, that is, an effort of perseverance that defines it. “The effort by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing other than the actual essence of the thing itself.” This statement of Ethics Spinoza's theory should not be read too flatly, as if it were indicating an instinct for self-preservation; this does not summarize the thesis nor capture what is fundamental in it for us.

For human beings, the notion of life goes beyond that of mere biological existence maintained at any cost and under any circumstances. If this were not the case, such commonplace ideas as sacrifice, suicide and heroism would not make sense. For us, beyond biological life, there is that which conforms to a way of existing and experiencing the world, people and things. All of this is part of the conatus that each one is.

Victory is an exceptional illustration of the tensions involved in this philosophical thesis while at the same time illuminating it, suggesting a particular understanding that is unwilling to be simplistic. Dona Nina does not just want to stay alive. Saddened, on her worst days, she strives to recover her life, her way of life; and that is why she is so reluctant to abandon the house she bought and where she keeps her things, welcomes Marcinho, and which serves as a point of reference for people and places that still make her feel like Dona Nina, that is, feel like herself. But everything will literally go down the drain.

The coffee dripping is the sign of the emergence of another dimension of the same problem, which she will have to face and will do so in an unexpected way. The final escape, so to speak, goes against all her grumpiness; it was what she abhorred, what she refused to do… Even so, a surprising and vigorous coherence is revealed in her attitude.

Virtuously, during these very sad days, Dona Nina gets up, understands and seizes fortune. From there comes, without a doubt, her supreme Victory.

* Homer Santiago He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at USP.

Reference

Victory

Brazil, 2025, 113 minutes.

Directed by: Andrucha Waddington and Breno Silveira.

Script: Paula Fiúza.

Cast: Fernanda Montenegro, Silvio Guindane, Jeniffer Dias, Linn da Quebrada.

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