‘Malu’ Review: Superbly Acted Brazilian Drama Traces Tumultuous Mother-Daughter Relationships
27.01.2024 - 22:57
/ variety.com
Carlos Aguilar Smoking weed and telling off Catholic priests are just two of the ways Malu Rocha (Yara de Novaes) asserts her rebellious spirit. The eccentric, indomitable and idiosyncratic actress at that center of Pedro Freire’s feature debut “Malu” is the embodiment of a highly flammable substance. Her volatile personality, capable of consuming everything in her way, ignites a Rio de Janeiro-set intergenerational drama inspired by the life story of the director’s mother.
Malu doesn’t live in the present. Most of the time, she’s either retelling stories from her youth about getting into trouble with the law during the dictatorship years, or else rambling about a hypothetical future. Malu dreams of turning her home into a cultural center where kids from the nearby favela can come for recreational activities and theater productions.
But the property needs as many repairs as do her relationships with both her elderly mother Lili (Juliana Carneiro da Cunha) and her daughter Joana (Carol Duarte), who’s just returned to Brazil from France and is also pursuing acting. The highs are luminously high, and the lows are terrifyingly low among this trio of women. Each has her own wounds — from each other, from the men in their lives — manifested in screaming matches charged with deeply rooted resentment.
At times, they quite literally claw at each other’s faces with animalistic virulence. Within the boxy aspect ratio that cinematographer Mauro Pinheiro Jr. commands, there are shots of Malu, Joana and Lili positioned in the back, middle and foreground respectively — a visual representation of this fiery lineage.
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