What do we do and think when we are “alone”, how to express this mental world populated by “vast emotions and imperfect thoughts”? How do experiences become a gush of words and speeches and these can become body, performance and images: cinema?
G.H., Clarice Lispector’s character who takes the body and voice of Maria Fernanda Cândido, is the protagonist, confined, of a book published in 1964 and now transcreated for the cinema by Luiz Fernando Carvalho.
In the book and in the film, perhaps the “reason” that detonates this individual and/or collective “being alone”, narrated with ferocity, is less important: the maid who decides to leave, the visceral encounter with a cockroach, the end of a passion, or, we might add: a devastating pandemic or simply chance or everyday banality in person. The decisive thing is that “it” overflows into an event, in the sense of that which breaks our bodily and psychic automatisms, and produces something too terrible, too beautiful, too distressing.