Hour of the Star

Suzana Amaral's film is adapted from Clarice Lispector's last novel. Macabéa, played by Marcélia Cartaxo, has come from the northeast to São Paulo; she is an orphan who types documents full of errors and whom nobody notices. She likes drinking cola, listens to the radio, and does not even know her life is bad. The hardest thing the film does is here: Amaral does not present Macabéa as pitiable. Her lack of awareness is not a deficiency but the thing holding her up, and the film never tries to wake her. The narrating voice of Lispector's novel is absent; instead the camera looks at Macabéa directly, in exactly the way the novel's narrator could not. Cartaxo won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival in 1986 for the role. The film took Best Film at the Brasília festival in 1985, where Amaral was named Best Director. Who it is for: viewers who value Brazilian cinema, Lispector, and films about invisible people. Who it is not for: anyone wanting plot or transformation, both of which the film refuses.