Year:2024

Written and directed by: Pedro Freire

Runtime: 100 minutes

Starring: Juliana Carneiro da Cunha, Yara de Novaes, Carol Duarte, Átila Bee

By Sarah Manvel

Relationships between mothers and daughters can often be fraught, but rarely are they as poisonous and loving combined as shown here in “Malu,” an assured Brazilian movie which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The three women at the story’s core – grandmother Lourdes aka Lili (Juliana Carneiro da Cunha), her daughter Malu (Yara de Novaes) and Malu’s adult daughter Joana (Carol Duarte) – are intertwined in the way you can only be with family, always on the knife edge between love and hate.

It’s 1990 and Malu owns a large, rundown house in a Rio favela which she dreams of turning into a theatre that will resurrect her acting career. She came of age when Brazil was under a dictatorship, and she coped with the political repression in the usual way, by blowing her mind out with drugs. She rents a room to a much younger friend, Tibira (Átila Bee), a queer cabaret artist of color, who Lili hates with a passion that Tibira cheerfully ignores. Lili brings a priest around to give Malu a talking to, but after Malu accuses him of being a pedophile and sends him scurrying out the door, Lili physically attacks Malu. This has two after-effects; Malu immediately banishes Lili to live in a storage shed in the garden, and Malu has bad scratches on her face when she goes to collect Joana from the station. Joana has been away in France for some years, but despite some good reviews has failed to succeed as an actress there. She carefully tells her mother she’ll be moving to São Paulo to try her luck there, which Malu takes as a terrible betrayal. And this is all before Lili attempts to poison anybody.

The movie is nowhere near as exhausting as this description sounds, for two reasons; the women have an enormous sense of humour about their troubles, and they really, really love each other. But they also are absolutely fantastic at making things worse for themselves. For example, Lili thinks nothing of peeing in the street when she’s caught short while out on errands with Joana, and Malu’s utter inability to think before she speaks means that she’s capable of causing the most tremendous harm with a few vicious words. It’s no wonder Joana has a tendency to chew her cuticles, and to cut Malu’s stories short. But they also go shopping for Lili’s birthday present together, and throw her a charming party that isn’t remotely spoiled by taking place in an electricity cut. Mauro Pinheiro Jr’s cinematography does an excellent job of finding the light in the darkness, too.

There’s so much drama in “Malu” you hardly notice there are only the four main characters, and writer/director Pedro Freire never allows the movie to be hemmed in by place or circumstance. There’s a raucous sense of fun in Ms de Novaes’ performance as a woman who has made her own bed, but is determined to bounce in it. There’s also an astonishing scene when Lili makes a drunken confession to Malu and Tibira of something horrible from her childhood, which gives Ms Carneiro da Cunha an incredibly difficult emotional task that she carries off with aplomb. People talk a lot about generational trauma but here it is, not talked about, and all the more powerful because Malu and Tibira immediately rise to the occasion of respecting it, while not necessarily changing their opinion of Lili. Joana is the normal one in the family, giving Ms Duarte less to do, but she’s the moral core which holds the whole movie together. This is a wonderful movie about how people continue after the damage done, and how love makes it all so much easier. It’s well worth seeking out.