Cinema Releases - The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao

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Week Starting 12th November

From 19th November onwards:

★★★★★
"This delayed release of the winner of Un Certain Regard at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival was worth waiting for. An old-school, lush melodrama featuring long-suffering women, period costumes, and an epic temporal span that starts in Rio de Janeiro during the 1950's...strikes the perfect balance between awards bait and telenovela.
Cinematographer Helene Louvart - known for her collaborations with Agnes Varda, Claire Denis, and Alice Rohrwacher - finds a lavish seam to offset the miserabilism. Carol Duarte and Julia Stockler are movingly stoical. The screenplay, adapted by Murilo Hauser, Ines Bortagaray and director Karim Ainouz, is expertly calibrated. They don't make them like this any more."
Tara Brady, THE IRISH TIMES

★★★★"The movie is saturated with emotion and colour....this gorgeous and moving melodrama finds two women in 1950's Rio under suffocating family expectations - and sees what happens when they are defied.
"Sisters fight the pain of patriarchy...both the two female leads are terrific and there is a powerful intimacy here that is incredibly satisfying."
Cath Clarke, THE GUARDIAN

"Karim Ainouz's gorgeous melodrama The invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao...adapted from a popular novel by Martha Batalha, it's a story of sisterly love enduring across decades of misfortune and forced separation. It's the kind of story that might have been filmed as a sudsy "women's picture" in the golden age of Hollywood.  Ainouz doesn't hold back on the emotion either: it tumbles forth with humid, sumptuous excess, the performances as grandly expressive as the swooning score and tropically hued, oil-painted cinematography." 
Guy Lodge, THE OBSERVER


"Ainouz makes a triumphant return to feature films with this transcendent 'tropical melodrama' about the enduring bond between two not-so distant sisters,w hich won Cannes' Un Certain Regard prize.

The film is undoubtedly full-blooded, but that doesn’t mean it lacks subtlety or nuance; indeed, as it progresses through the 50s, chronicling the changes in the two siblings’ lives, it explores, to richly rewarding affect, notions of family and friendship, love and loyalty."
If this is melodrama, it is so only in the best sense of the word.”
Geoff Andrew, SIGHT & SOUND

"Karim Aïnouz’s lovely melodrama… gorgeous Brazilian movie…you may want to cry well before this deeply moving, slowly blood-boiling movie is through. The sins of the patriarchy are fairly out in the open in “Invisible Life” — Manuel’s dogmatic conservatism, Antenor’s man-child ignorance — but there are no easy or one-note villains. For the director as well as the audience, hating the men in this movie is of secondary importance to loving its women, as Aïnouz so clearly does."
"Aïnouz is working firmly and confidently in a grand tradition of melodrama; there’s a hint of Douglas Sirk, a master of the form, in his expressionistic use of color, particularly cool greens and warm reds, to heighten the intensity of his characters’ emotions."
"...it’s implicitly a story about innumerable unseen women, in 1950s Brazil and beyond, who have toiled and suffered, rebelled and prevailed."
Justin Chang, THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE

'In a melodrama, you might hope that things will be highly colored. But nothing quite prepares you for the ecstatic, chromatic intensity of Karim Aïnouz’s Invisible Life. To call the film a riot of color doesn’t begin to do it justice: color here doesn’t so much riot as surge, swoon, ebb and flow in a delirious tide of euphoria, and sometimes solemnity. I used the term ‘melodrama’ at the start, although it’s by no means certain that Invisible Life is one. You might call it that in the sense that its picture of women’s lives several decades ago echoes the Hollywood ‘women’s pictures’ of the 40s and 50s (rather than the more narratively-loaded Latin American telenovela tradition)."
"The film manages to make its leads work as teenagers and as somewhat older women battered by harsh experience, and they are both terrific."
"Visually, the film is a triumph not only for Aïnouz and Louvart, but for colorist Dirk Meier’s worth mentioning by name because in general, when it comes to film reviews, colorists really do live invisible lives.”
Jonathan Romney, FILM COMMENT

“Gorgeous Brazilian movie…you may want to cry well before this deeply moving, slowly blood-boiling movie is through. Directed by the gifted Karim Aïnouz, the movie tells the story of Euridice and Guida (Julia Stockler), two sisters in 1950’s Rio. It’s a drama of resilient women, thoughtless men and crushingly unrealized dreams, told with supple grace, deep feeling and an empathy that extends in every direction." Justin Chang, LOS ANGELES TIMES

Critic's Pick: "Sisterhood Is Stronger Than Patriarchy"
"Lush imagery and action...Its mix of vivid period detail and raw frankness about sexuality and poverty and women'suppresion is heady and bracing; its depiction of female friendship and love is pointedly ferocious." Glen Kenny, NEW YORK TIMES

"This year's Cannes Un Certain Regard winner is a nourishing melodrama elevated by Karim Aïnouz's singular, saturated directorial style."
"Crowd pleasing and emotionally assessible...a waking dream, saturated in sound, music and color to match its depth of feeling...“A tropical melodrama... Karim Aïnouz’s ravishing period saga lives up to the description — high emotion articulated with utmost sincerity and heady stylistic excess, all in the perspiring environs of midcentury Rio de Janeiro — while surprising with its pointed feminist politics and occasionally sharp social truths."
"This heartbroken tale of two sisters separated for decades by familial shame and deceit is...a florid sensory experience...his most crowd pleasing feature to date."
Guy Lodge, VARIETY

"Melodrama is a neglected genre, often delivered with a post-modern twist these days. Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz proves in this stirring, heart-wrenching period film that it can be served straight up and still work a treat. This tough, good-looking family saga...Aïnouz and his scriptwriters know full well that melodramas don't just get by on sympathy - they need our anger as well."
Lee Marshall, SCREEN INTERNATIONAL

"It is classic storytelling that will delight those who like their dramas full of twists and turns, with pain and anger, in a film that highlights the changing position of women in society."
Kaleem Aftab, CINEUROPA

"A beautifully shot, impeccability acted and emotionally potent family drama. Both Duarte and Stockler are magnetic on screen, delivering wonderfully observed and full bodied performances. Helene Louvart’s cinematography is sumptuous whilst Aïnouz steers a sympathetic and empathetic path through the lives of his heroines. At its heart, The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao is an elegant and emotive story about two women struggling to build a life for themselves."
Rob Aldam, BACKSTREET MAFIA

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Karim Ainouz onstage at Toronto - YouTube

Interview with Karim Ainouz here

Interview with Karim Ainouz here - DMovies