Mar de Rosas

The history of cinema is also made of rediscoveries. In 2015, Mar de Rosas was included in a list of the best Brazilian films and, to our great joy, gained new life.

Shot in 1977, at the height of the Brazilian dictatorship, the film is, despite its title, a true act of rebellion. As Pierre Kast rightly wrote at the time: “the author has kindly placed a small ton of dynamite on the screen” — quite right. Thanks to allegories, metaphors, and a great deal of irony, Ana Carolina managed to circumvent the heavy hand of censorship: Mar de Rosas ran for two months in Rio de Janeiro, where it was seen by more than 400,000 people, and earned recognition and praise at several international festivals, largely because of its extravagant reflection on the female condition within a castrating family structure. But now, with the benefit of distance, we can see that the director's first fiction film goes far beyond this framework. Other lines of interpretation are possible, and that alone says a great deal about its transgressive energy.

We could argue, for example, that it is a journey of political liberation, or even the exorcism of the filmmaker herself, who wrote the script based on her rebellious youth. The mother character—provocatively named Felicidade (Norma Bengell)—wants to escape the dead end of her marriage; she tries to express her ideas, but is constantly interrupted by her husband. In contrast, Betinha (Cristina Pereira, who, amazingly, was 27 at the time) limits herself to reciting proverbs or nursery rhymes, not caring about words. Deep down, it is her body that speaks and what she wants is to act, that is, to break the systems of power and finally overcome the ineffectiveness of her mother, grandmother, and all the women who came before them. In fact, the first shot in daylight immediately lays its cards on the table by showing us the teenager in her light blue gingham dress, peeing and wetting her white sandals.

The film is divided into five movements ranging from moderato to prestissimo and from journey to escape. Despite the histrionic tone of the characters, the camera remains calm and somewhat detached (one might say that it still retains Ana Carolina's documentary spirit), which provides a paradoxical dialectic that is rare to find in cinema. It all begins with the two traveling in a car with Sérgio (Hugo Carvana) — husband/father — on Via Dutra, the road connecting Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo. The couple argues while Betinha, sitting in the back seat, makes faces and strikes indecent poses. The scene ends in a hotel: Felicidade attacks her husband with a razor blade and, convinced she has killed him, flees with her daughter.

What follows is a short trip with just the two of them, during which Betinha begins to put into practice cruel gestures reflecting a primitive desire to get rid of her mother: she scribbles beard-like marks on her face, scratches her neck with a baby pin, and, when they stop at a service station, sets fire near her legs.

A man wearing a suit and sunglasses who has been following them offers to help them and they continue their journey in his black Volkswagen Beetle. Orlando Barde (Otávio Augusto) represents a greater oppression, he is an image of the dictatorship that haunts Brazil. He himself says that one of his functions is to make others, whether they are afraid or not, obey him. When Felicidade discovers that he has a gun hidden under the seat, she gets out of the car and tries to run away, but she runs into a bus and faints in the street.

Dona Niobi (Miriam Muniz) helps her and takes her to the house where she lives with Dr. Dirceu (Ary Fontoura), “who should be a poet, but happens to be a dentist.” This scene is the centerpiece of the film; it lasts over 40 minutes and fully adheres to Ana Carolina's objectives: “[in Mar de Rosas] I made a kind of archetypal X-ray of family relationships, an X-ray of a family pathology.” It resembles a volcanic eruption because, for the first time, five people are confined to a very ordinary petit bourgeois home (a living room with sofas, cushions, rugs, a table in the center, a television, and swallows on the wall), grappling freely with their fragile human condition. They all speak at once, nervously and shouting—almost always using clichés that prove completely empty—and no one listens to anyone else. At one point, Betinha plays another trick: she locks her mother in the room facing the street and sends a truck—no doubt from the depths of her childish unconscious—to dump dirt through the window to bury her. This does not happen: once again, the absurdity of the situation is integrated as something commonplace and the scene becomes a theater stage where each character reveals their innermost feelings in the performance of a decadent play. While rubbing dirt on her face, Miriam Muniz utters the most epiphanic lines in the film: “if people rise up, everything changes, the immovable becomes fixed, the wicked become harmless, and the hysterical become historical."

Indifferent to the meanings of words, Betinha does not give up on her impulses and hides razor blades in the soap, but it is the failed poet who cuts himself while washing his hands and bleeds with joy.

Meanwhile, the mother—who by this point is a complete wreck: wounded, dirty, with torn and burned clothes—takes advantage of a distraction by her husband's henchman to flee once again. After some exciting tracking shots, they manage to reach the station and catch a train to São Paulo. Barde finds them and handcuffs himself to Felicidade, but the one who has the last word on this crazy trip is Betinha: full of mischief, she plays “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe" to decide their future and, in the end, pushes her mother. Felicidade and Barde fall off the train and down a ravine. In the last shot, we see this little libertarian angel giving the camera and us the finger. Whoever is free, free they are!