The Way He Looks / Hoje eu Quero Voltar Sozinho
Gothenburg
Sun 1 Oct
17:00 — Hagabion
Stockholm
Sat 7 Oct
20:30 — Zita Room 2
Swedish Subtitles
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Svenska Undertexter
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Swedish Subtitles 〰️ Svenska Undertexter 〰️
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PRODUCTION YEAR: 2014
GENRE: Drama/Romance
DIRECTOR: Daniel Ribeiro
COUNTRY: Brazil
FILM DURATION: 1h36
AGE LIMIT: Not rated
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Leonardo is a blind teenager searching for independence. His everyday life, the relationship with his best friend Giovana, and the way he sees the world change completely with the arrival of Gabriel.
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LANGUAGE: Portuguese
SUBTITLES: Swedish
Review
Brazilian director Daniel Ribeiro made his first solo short film in 2007, entitled Café com Leite (You, Me and Him). Before that, he had worked with Eduardo Mattos on, among other films, the very funny and playfully trashy A Mona do Lotação (2007). In his "first" film, he reconciled the themes of mourning, orphanhood and the paternal responsibility of an older brother who suddenly finds himself as an adult, against the backdrop of a secret homosexual relationship.
What is touching about this film is the way in which the director balances romantic love with fraternal/parental love without ever imposing the notion of a new family, but rather allowing his audience to be carried away by the natural restructuring of affections - with the special nuance that there is never any need for a coming out, because the reality of the characters' feelings is clearer than their words. According to the director himself, it was during the festival circuit of that short film that the basic idea for what would become The Way He Looks, Daniel Ribeiro's feature debut, was born.
However, on the advice of the producer (Diana Almeida), before moving directly to the long format, he made a short version of the same film, already with the main cast and telling exactly the same story, but in only 15 minutes, as a way of rehearsing the possibilities of a longer film, testing the capabilities of the cast and producing an object that could also serve as a quality assurance for eventual financing.
This short film is entitled Eu Não Quero Voltar Sozinho (I Don't Want to Go Back Alone, 2010), the Portuguese title of the feature film being an inversion of the short film's title, "Today I Want to Go Back Alone".
The story is the same in both films: a blind boy, Leonardo (Guilherme Lobo), falls in love with the new student in his class, Gabriel (Fábio Audi). In the feature version, the complexity of the boys' feelings and those of Leo's best friend, Giovana (Tess Amorim), is made up of mistakes, doubts, assumptions, misunderstandings and everything that makes up teenage desire – summed up in the intelligent metaphor of the lunar eclipse. Like You, Me and Him, the protagonist's sexuality is secondary to the main narrative axis, the coming-of-age trajectory and adolescent first love story.
It's true that there's the issue of school bullying (which is much more ableist than homophobic), while the center of the action is much more about the emancipation of the blind teenager from his hyper-protective mother. That is why the titles of the short and feature films are reversed: while in the former the focus is on teenage passion (hence Leo's desire for Gabriel's company walking home), in the latter this is mixed with the desire for independence and autonomy, which results from the introduction of the characters of the mother, father and grandmother and the subplot of the exchange school in Los Angeles.
While it's true that Daniel Ribeiro is trying to make a movie for the public, using a clear language, directing actors close to the formulas of soap operas and using a series of narrative solutions typical of television productions, it's curious to note the way in which the film deals with Leo's subjectivity (from a formal perspective). Since the character is blind, the director never offers a point-of-view shot of the boy, opting instead, in a systematic way (which demonstrates a surprising coherence), for medium shots with various characters or, in the case of the shot/reverse shot, choosing asymmetrical axes that move away from Leo's "line of sight". This need for exteriority is evident (or rather crystallized) in the recurring choice of god's eye shots, which film the characters from a point of view that is totally foreign to them (simply observing them without intervention).
Although this solution is frequent, it doesn't carry a sense of detachment or coldness - rather, it reflects a sense of fairness in the relationship between the characters' "gazes". Perhaps for this reason, the most surprising moment in the film comes in Leonardo's nightmare, which is entirely constructed in a point-of-view shot.
Ricardo Vieira Lisboa
À pala de Walsh