This is not the first time that Luiz Fernando Carvalho has tackled a work that needs to be adapted for the screen. With his first feature film, “To the Left of the Father” (Lavoura Arcaica, 2001), the Brazilian filmmaker recreated the universe of writer Raduan Nassar’s first novel, preserving the intent, a key element when it comes to dealing with the freedom of licenses in storylines, and the “plausible and believable” in cinematic passages. However, this time, faced with a story from a different nature, the director takes on an existential work by Clarice Lispector, “The Passion According to G.H.”, to subvert it within the most problematic cinematic imagination: the structure of the male gaze, or rather, the male gaze’s reminiscence of a fascinating subject/object, which has been the subject of hundreds of films throughout cinema history: the representation of women’s catharsis, anguish, pain, and hysteria.
The title of Lispector’s work, which the filmmaker chose to maintain, effectively speaks of passion understood as suffering, torment, rapture, and frenzy. The plot of Lispector’s book, published in 1964, and therefore of Carvalho’s work, is sustained by G.H.’s death drive—a sophisticated, upper-class woman who unravels after dismissing the only domestic worker she had, an Afro-descendant woman.