Eu, tu, eles (Waddington
2000) corresponds to the group of movies produced after the
Audio-Visual Law was imposed by two-term Brazilian president
Carlos Henrique Cardoso.
Even though this new epoch of democratic freedom produced a
number of films, very few of them had a dramatic change on the
depiction of women’s sexuality and desire.
The story is
focused on the Northeast of Brazil, in a small, hot town: Ceará.
Darlene (Regina Casé), the main character, leaves the town after
a failed wedding, pregnant and alone. Three years later she
returns with a small child and shortly thereafter leaves the
child with his biological father. Darlene however, upon arriving
in the town, is proposed to by Osías (Lima Duarte). Osías offers
her the house he just built in exchange for her being his wife.
Soon after, Darlene gets pregnant and it is suggested that the
child is not Osías’ son. Osías accepts the child as his own,
even though he does not seem too content with the child’s
differing skin color.
Darlene works in
the fields and at home while her husband rests in a hammock.
Osías’ cousin, Zezinho (Stênio Garcia), comes to live with the
couple and children soon after the baby is born. Darlene and
Zezinho then create an affinity that evolves their friendship
into a romance. As a result of their relationship, Darlene gets
pregnant again. The couple and Osias, being aware of the
romance, live together happily in the same house with their
children without feeling any discomfort for the unusual family
they are. They live in harmony until a fourth party appears on
the scene. Ciro (Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos), a young and handsome
man, arrives in town searching for a job. Ciro and Darlene meet
and Osías ends up inviting him to stay and live with them. Ciro
and Darlene work together in the fields where they initiate a
romance in the middle of the sugar cane plantation. After a
short while, Darlene gets pregnant for the fourth time. The
story concludes with the arrival of Ciro’s baby and the
agreement of both husband and lovers to all live together in
order to not to lose Darlene.
Analysis
During the
Cinema novo movement the sertão was depicted
as an impoverished area where social and economical differences
would clash between the land-owner and peasant, like in the
canonical sertão movies: Glauber Rocha’s, Deus e
diabo na terra do sol/Black God White Devil
(Brazil,1964), Nelson do Santos’, Vidas secas
(Brazil,1963) and Os fuzis’, Ruy Guerra (Brazil,1964).
Cinema novo’s social goals of the sixties were to denounce
and vindicate through art the marginalized individual of Brazil.
This artistic movement attempted to vindicate and integrate
through cultural representations of the displaced and pheriferic
social subject; however, women as a marginal group were not part
of this endeavor.
Eu, tu, eles
is filmed in the Brazilian sertão, the Northeastern
desert- a beautiful region where the cactus and donkey are
abundant. Eu, tu, eles, parallelizes the idea of the
desert as a geographical frame of the movie and the desert
women’s pleasure within the social imagery imposed by
patriarchal rules as displayed in other Brazilian movies.
Darlene’s character appears in opposition to theorist Doane’s
posture, who argues that women are only represented in film as
perfect spectators, “Yet, women would seem to be perfect
spectators, culturally positioned as they are outside the arena
of history, politics and production – ‘longing on’”(Desire 2).
Darlene’s behavior is unfamiliar (umheimlich)
as it succeeds in opening a unique vision of woman’s pleasure
and sexual agency. The unfamiliarity with Darlene’s sexual
conduct code had apparently stricken for more than one reason.
In Oricchio’s opinion, the fact that the sertão is the
physical scenario of the film has shocked the spectator more
than if it were an urban movie: “In the heartland of Brazil,
known for its moral conservatism, Darlene’s story has much more
impact than it would have had if it had been set in Ipanema, for
example” (Oricchio 154).
Counter posing the traditional
female sexual/social passivity and the imbalance in the glance
as Mulvey states, “to-be-looked-at-ness,” Eu,tu,eles
presents a woman who breaks the hegemony of the respect to the
norm and positions herself within a cinematic space
uncategorizable as a “woman’s film.” First, because the plot
ruptures with what is called the esthetic of identity, and
second, it is a film that is not made for women by women (the
director is a man). Dennison and Shaw have stated that Eu, tu,
eles’ main character depicts, “a modern kind of female
malandragem,
which involves a clear inversion of traditional gender roles”
(216). While Luiz Zanin Oricchio argues that the main character
proposes a turn of the screw on the Brazilian’s dual perception
of themselves, according to Nelson Rodriguez: “Sometimes
(Brazil) it is a nation that does not like itself, with an
inferiority complex, a perverse narcissist who spits at his own
image.” (154) According to Oricchio, Darlene incarnates the
positive side of Brazilianess, embracing her search for
happiness and accomplishing at any price.
Darlene certainly
withholds the opposite thread of women’s depiction of desire and
pleasure in Brazilian films. The opening of the film displays
Darlene holding a candle in the obscurity of her rural shack and
displays the first leitmotiv of Eu, tu, eles. In this
clever Waddington rhetorical strategy, the usage of illumination
in the film allegorizes the obscurity of separation in gender
patterns. The film starts by showing Darlene with a candle
because there is no electricity in her humble house; it shows a
close-up of her hand brightening her path, which is the first
metaphor of her leading a new way, opening a new alternative for
women’s roles and agency. The second scene shows Darlene visibly
pregnant, wearing her wedding dress, awakening her mother to say
goodbye. The light configures the space and creates a cinematic
fiction; the obscurity/darkness of the house contrasts with the
brightness of the outside. The spectacle and phenomenon of the
collective illusion of public/private, man/woman differences is
where man is the owner of the public sphere and woman of the
private. Darlene holds the candle and awakens her mother to
promise her that she would be back when her grandchild is born.
The mother’s response creates the second film’s leitmotiv:
“que deus te proteja de ter filha mulher” (“God protects you to
have a daughter”).
Darlene’s mother
rejects the role ascribed to women in society and to protect her
grandchild from being the continuation of these unending chains
of submission, she prays that Darlene’s child not be a girl. The
perpetuation of women’s submissive image to patriarchal needs is
what she rejects. According to her personal perspective and how
she has lived the patriarchal culture, it is not worthy to even
try to revolt against the patriarchal construction of gender
positions in society. A collective suicide, an erasure of women
as it is conceived for societal constraints is what symbolizes
Darlene’s mother’s pledge: a limit of resistance, the
disappearance of these oppressed subjects. In other words,
according to Darlene’s mother it is more convenient to disappear
as a submissive entity and avoid the reproduction of a new
generation of un-voiced subjects.
Motherhood has a
double significance in the film. It is not a coincidence that
the movie is initiated and finalized with Darlene’s two
pregnancies, the former in evolution and the latter with the
birth of Ciro’s son. Darlene’s maternity involves two aspects
that are intertwined and counter posed at the same time. One is
the challenge to the dominant culture’s ideology and the other
is her being victimized through maternity. At a technical level
there are two scenes at the beginning and at the end of the
movie that suggest a confrontation of spaces. The rectangular
line on the highway and the inclined line shaped with the light
that falls upon the house where Darlene is giving birth suggest
unbalance- the risk of transgressing the traditional conception
of family at the end of the movie. This double
violation/transgression of social codes are: the first fact is
that she is being loved by 3 men at the same time who are afraid
of losing her; which constitutes a confrontation to the
patriarchal hierarchy; and the second fact is having all boys
instead of girls to perpetuate her reconfiguration of patterns
in a symbolic level.
In the film
Darlene refigures the power structure between sexes through her
jouissance.
Her relationships with the 3 men conforms her voyage to her
search of jouissance, her search as a right (droit)
to jouissance and not as an exchange of goods as stated
by Lacan.
In On Feminine
Sexuality (1975), Lacan states that there exists a
connection between the law and the female jouissance.
According to him, jouissance only exists if pleasure
itself is its purpose; that is, there is not an authentic
pleasure if behind it exists a purpose other than pleasure: “Jouissance
is what serves no purpose” (3). Jouissance is everything but
law, it is a right not an obligation, says Lacan. Pleasure has
to do with what he calls volonté de jouir or will of
pleasure, and not with a transaction of values or goods.
Darlene’s three
relationships represent her evolution and prefigure her process
to her dissidence to what society expects from her as a gender.
Her first husband is the “groom” who stood her up at the church.
The bright reddish scene lighting and the sun falling upon her
face and body suggest violence and anger as a motive and an
escape from the system of generic casts; when she takes off her
bride’s veil (socially and sexually) that is covering her face,
she rids herself of social constraints and gives an opening to
her change and dismissal of patriarchal rules. The columns in
the church seem to imprison her, as religion’s treatment of
women has been historically oppressive as well. The name of
Darlene’s first son, Dimas, reminds us of the “good thief” in
Christ’s crucifixion; as a parody of Catholic religion that
rejects sexual pleasure and proscribes it as “lust” in the
catechism. Darlene gives her first born to his father, who
abandoned her pregnant. This metaphorizes the rejection to which
women are subjected if they do not adjust to the role ascribed
to them and imposed by society, culture, language and religion.
Darlene leaves the condemnation and significance of being a
woman in a patriarchal society and removes it from her
subjectivity, which is a part of her like her son was part of
her as well (bodily and emotionally speaking).
Her second partner
is Osías with whom she agrees to marry as an exchange for his
house. Here, for the first time, clothes appear as a Lacanian
symbol of habits/costume. When Osías proposes to Darlene, she is
hanging her clothes, exposing them. Osías offers her a place to
live and his intentions of marrying her: “se você agrada a casa
e sua…tu casa comigo e a casa é sua…casa comigo de minha parte o
acordo está feito” (If you want my house it’s yours, if you
marry me the house will be yours, marry me, for my part the deal
is done”). Lacan calls it droit in the sense of law, an
exchange of goods. Osías wants a wife and he offers her marriage
in exchange of the material goods he owns.
The second step is
her relationship with Zezinho. The significance of clothes again
appears when Darlene is washing her clothes in the river and she
is letting it take them away. Zezinho appears from the other
side of the river picking up some of her clothes. In Lacanian
symbolism, she would be getting rid of all the old habits
imposed on her as a woman. She enjoys her jouissance as a
right and not as law. According to Lacan, clothes are essential
to a person, what one wears, what one puts one, he calls it the
habits in two senses (customs, and clothes that are religious
attire). The river has a narrow (limited) “width,” like society
and its rigid patterns of behavior of genders. Lacan says:
“Clothes promise debauchery (ça promet la ménade), when one
takes them off […] to enjoy a body (jouir d’un corps) when there
are no more clothes leaves intact the question of what makes the
One, that is, the question of identification”(6). According to
Lacan, the subject is sexualized by its sexual organs, but
pleasure is not compromised with its sexualization. For Lacan,
to be (no matter which gender) it is only possible through
pleasure: “being is the jouissance of the body as such”(6).
Therefore, the body only acquires legitimacy if it accomplishes
a condition of pleasure, not as a law but as pleasure itself. At
the same time it is man who has the phallic power and who
dominates the public realm, while women who are not permitted by
the social construct to have jouissance; which makes them
invisible and illegible: “In fact woman does not exist, woman is
not whole (pas toute) –woman’s sexual organ is of no
interest (ne lui dit rien) except via the body’s
jouissance” (Lacan 7). In this sense, Darlene enjoys her
jouissance, which makes her visible as a woman and creates
an unbalance in what the signifier woman has to be within the
social hierarchies. Darlene’s power is acquired through her
orgasmic pleasure.
In contrast, the
character or Xica in Diegues’, Xica da Silva (Brazil,
1976) played by the popular black Brazilian actress Zezé Motta,
depicts what Lacan calls “jouissance of the other.” Xica is an
eighteenth century slave who gets involved with the
representative of the Portuguese crown in the colony. This
relationship endows her with certain “power” and privileges
until João Fernandes is removed from his position of power and
shipped back to Portugal.
Some critics like
Denninson have discussed Xica’s exhuberant sexuality as part of
her position of control, “Ohers have argued that slave women had
their bodies to barter with and little else at the time and Xica
is portrayed in the film as mostly in control of hers.” (Denninson,
172). The famous lines in the film uttered by her sexual
partners in every occasion that Xica has sexual intercourse are:
“Não Xica, não…!” (No, Xica, no…). Denninson observes that this
implies Xica’s power over her sexual partners: “She is seen as
initiating a sexual act of which her various partners are
fearful.” (Dennision 172) I would argue that evidently Xica’s
sexual knowledge of the others’ pleasure experience to provide
her lovers sexual pleasure (jouissance of the other), and
through that obtain certain favors. In other words, Xica’s
pleasure is related to “droit” as “law” and not as in “right” as
Lacan puts it. Xica provides pleasure as an exchange of goods,
favors and privileges and not as her right to have
pleasure. Her pleasure is regulated by the quantity and quality
of pleasure that she is capable of providing, and not for the
sake of pleasure itself. There is not a single scene in the film
that shows Xica having sex only for her legitimate own pleasure.
Her sexual partners are always individuals in power, even when
they are only symbolically in power. Whereas displayed in
Eu,tu, eles, Darlene’s jouissance evolves from the
Lacanian description of female pleasure as “law” to “right.” In
Xica there is not such an evolution; consequently, she is not in
power but she is only a sexual object that serves as a renderer
of their individual sexual practices and preferences which she
recognizes. It is surprising that Carlos Diegues, director of
the film, states that the film shows “culturally victorious”
subjects that are normally oppressed - referring to the African
Brazilian community. Xica is subjected and oppressed as a woman
and as a black, as she is a slave culturally and sexually.
Diegues fails to acknowledge, as most of the Cinemanovistas,
that women, as a gender, are marginal individuals as well, whom
the Cinema novo movement did not recognize as such.
Eu, tu, eles,
on the other hand, could have been a very good example of a
fresh representation of female sexuality and pleasure in
Brazilian cinema for the Cinema novo movement.
However, more than thirty years separate the production of Eu,
tu, eles and this artistic movement. The end of the movie is
totally absent of any moral judgment towards Darlene. Differing
from other Brazilian movies that also represent female
characters that dissent to their social ambience, (e.g.
Camurati’s Carlota Joaquina princesa do Brasil,
Bengell’s Eternamente Pagu, Salles’ Terra Estrageira).
The movie does not finalize with a dead or abandoned Darlene as
punishment for her intent to escape social parameters. Eu, tu,
eles supports Nágib’s argument, which states that the plots
in Brazilian cinema after the closure of Embrafilme are
linked with political correctness and the post-utopia moment.
Although; Eu, tu, eles contradicts her argument about the
sea as a “main symbol for the revolutionary utopia that inspired
Cinema novo;” the Northeastern desert is the symbol of
the revolutionary female pleasure in the film, and inscribes
women’s desire and pleasure in post Cinema novo. The
apocalypse is the inversion of the desert sertão that
turns into a symbolic sea of female jouissance.
The final scene in
the desert is a frame of the crossed gazes in a close-up of
Darlene and Osías who confront us to form a metaphorical
reflection of the masculinist control that Osías exercises upon
Darlene. When he registers the children, none of them his, this
legitimizes in two levels Darlene’s dissidence of gender
patterns. On one hand, Osías as her husband accepted by social
law (Lacanian law of the father), on the other hand, the very
fact that legitimizing the illegitimacy of the children,
legitimizes Darlene and inscribes her as a subject who
reconfigures female subjectivity.
Eu, tu, eles
makes ironic the norm of genders pacted socially and performs a
refreshing representation of female sexuality in Brazilian
cinema. The film shows a rupture with the portrayal of women as
submissive, abused and/or sexual objects. Eu, tu, eles
displays a new depiction of women and their pleasure, as a
rupture with the established models in traditional Brazilian
cinema. It poses at the same time, an ulterior reflection of
individual recreation as legitimate and legible subjects within
a society that has manipulated historically the gender patterns
of what is called “feminine identity.”
References
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