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Guida, played by Julia Stockler, is the main character of Karim Ainouz's film, "The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmão", which is released on December 11 on French screens. http://www.arpselection.com/

On the screens from Wednesday, December 11, the latest film by Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, awarded in Cannes by the prize Un certain regard. " The family is not blood, it's love, " says one of the heroines. An acid gaze on the family, in Brazil of the 1950s.

Letter games, mirror games. Guida and Euridice, two sisters, write a lot. Separated by the tyranny of an authoritarian and careful father, each one dreams in the letters that she writes to her sister the life of the other, the absent. At the beginning of the film, we are in a Portuguese family of recent immigration, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The father is a baker, and according to Guida, comes straight from Portugal in the 19th century. The mother is erased. Euridice is a pianist and dreams of joining a prestigious conservatory in Europe. Guida is in love with a Greek sailor with whom she fled.

We are in the 1950s, in a patriarchal, macho society where the

The filmmaker Karim Aïnouz, in Cannes in May 2019: his film won the prize of the section Un certain regard. REUTERS / Stephane Mahe

women exist only as wives, subject to the desires of their husbands, then mothers. Euridice does not want a child. Guida returns from Greece pregnant with her Greek husband. Dismissed by her father, she must support her son, take jobs from men and be reproached for stealing the work of a man, and loses sight of his sister to whom she writes. Her letters, in which she imagines Euridice in the golds of the Vienna opera, become an outlet, her diary. In order not to cause her parents more trouble, Euridice marries her, a Portuguese, employed by an administration, and temporarily sets aside her dreams of music. Two young women, two parallel universes echoing each other, two intrigues.

In this "tropical melodrama", that's how it is, Karim Ainouz draws a fierce portrait of a suffocating society. The atmosphere is moist, almost thick thanks to the color palette, rather dark. We are not in a sunny and colorful Brazil, but between walls covered with moss and mold, in bourgeois interiors where the mirrors send mute cries reminiscent of the pain of Munch's, in the poor interiors of the decommissioned. Mirrors - as in this extraordinary scene where the two sisters meet without seeing each other in a restaurant - doors, corridors that help to enclose souls. Denied sexualities (hallucinating scene of Euridice's wedding night), impossible loves, lives built on lies.

Júlia Stockler (Guida) and Carol Duarte (Euridice), the two actresses of the film, in May 2019 in Cannes. RFI

Architect and visual artist by training, Karim Aïnouz likes to explore the material, the colors, to make sensitive the bodies. As in his previous films of fiction, since Madame Satã or again The sky of Suely , he works his palette. He, who says he was raised by women, likes to stage strong female characters like Guida and Euridice. The film is also a free adaptation of the novel of a writer, journalist-novelist Martha Batalha (published in 2015). Women who never despair of living their dreams despite the web in which they are stuck.

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