Posthumous Memoirs / Memórias Póstumas

Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the classic 19th-century Brazilian novelist, published "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" in Rio in 1881, as the first "autobiography" ever written by a dead man. From the novel's beginning--the memoir's dedication "to the worm who first bit into the cold flesh of my cadaver"--Machado's imaginative playfulness as an author and inventor of new ways of telling stories is clear to the reader.

To adapt such a complicated literary world to that of the screen, with its less ambiguous sense of "reality," is a bold undertaking, yet André Klotzel (whose "Strong Mean / A Marvada Carne" is also included in this series) is up to the challenge. In fact, the earlier film established Klotzel as a director/writer who could play ably and with great humor with all the story-telling conventions of film-making. No wonder that the film won so many prizes at the 2001 Gramado Festival of Brazilian and Latin American Cinema, perhaps South America's most important film festival.

As a work of literary adaptation, this is a film worthy of close study. Following the novel's pattern, Klotzel starts with the protagonist's death, recounted in the first person and then skips around in Brás Cubas's life as he sees fit, telling us about the rich man's life, loves, and passions as he sees fit and with the honesty that only a dead narrator can give to recounting the world with equanimity.

In fact, the film, like the novel, is really about the problems of telling stories. Machado de Assis takes the reader's expectations and systematically plays with them, causing the reader to think about the nature of the fictional world and the conventions of story-telling itself. There is a constant sense of amusement, for instance, as the author (and his narrator) introduce characters who seem to promise possible outcomes for the story, but then suddenly disappear. Klotzel takes many of the literary devices and transfers them to the screen. In addition, he looks at the parallel conventions of story-telling in the movies and plays with them in ways that echo the cleverness of Machado de Assis.

The representations and recreations of 19th-century Rio de Janeiro are another part of the film's many delights--which also include fine performances by some of Brazil's finest actors, from Reginaldo Faria as Brás Cubas to Viétia Rocha as his great love Virgília to Sônia Braga as the prostitute Marcela, his first great passion.

Klotzel's and the film's great creative merit is how he maintains the story's literariness and its wry humorous qualities from beginning to end, with few if any obvious compromises. The viewer will want to go back and read Machado de Assis's delicious stories again, after seeing this delightful movie.