Reviews: Um é pouco, dois é bom
On Fungi and Films
by Maíra Oliveira
Fungi are microscopic organisms of the Fungi kingdom that do well in humid environments which are rich in organic material. Aspergillus, Penicillium and Cladosporium were a constant threat to ancient films – especially the celluloid ones. The fungi release enzymes on a molecular level which break up the gelatin of the layers of emulsion, where the images are registered. This forms blotches, loss of contrast and fading, especially in colour films, which depend on different layers to capture the spectrum of colours. The blue layer which is the most sensitive, is one of the first to be degraded, leaving films with a yellow or green hue. The result is that colourful scenes are transformed into indistinct blurs, a gradual loss of details which blot out the memory engraved on the celluloid — from blue to green, yellow… Finally to white.
How do I know this? Before dedicating myself to writing and to cinema — in another life— I spent my days cultivating neurons in a research laboratory for neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s, at Rio de Janeiro’s Federal University. 12 years dealing with these and other varieties of fungi which, as they contaminated the cultures, impaired the neurons, fundamental for research into the formation, maintenance and health of memory.
In a way my transition – or flight – from medical biochemical research to cinema maintained this constant struggle for the preservation of memory. However, in film preservation, fungi represent more than a physical problem, they symbolise the challenge of maintaining the narratives which compose our culture alive.
Odilon Lopez’s gesture of depositing his film Um é pouco, dois é bom (Brazil, 1970, Première Brasil Clássicos Restaurados) for preservation at the Brazilian Cinematheque becomes even more significant in this context. The director guaranteed that his work should survive the passage of time, allowing it to be restored and accessible to new generations. Did he imagine that, by protecting his film from deterioration, he was also protecting a part of the memory which Brazil tries so hard to forget?
Blue, green, yellow… White.
It is not only the real fungi which threaten to wipe out history. Brazilian cinema has been a self-devouring fungus for decades, corroding the coloured presence on its screens. The absence of melanised characters and filmmakers in its productions, as well as the lack of care in preserving their work, contributes to an invisibility as corrosive as the physical blotches on the celluloid.
Odilon, by choosing to preserve his film, challenged this wiping out of memory and, aware of the limitations of his era, made sure of also marking his presence. He chose to keep the image of his hand in the frame of the final scenes of the first part of Um é pouco, dois é bom. He could have cut it out, but did not. It seems to me that his decision to leave his black skin visible in the scene in which Jorge (Carlos Carvalho) builds a barrier in his house is a gesture which contradicts the logic of a film conceived as a window for the audience to observe without necessarily, seeing themselves. It was a reminder that he, a black filmmaker, was there, challenging the norms.
“That which is too tight will rip open”, and maybe Odilon knew this from the start. He knew that, even when we adapt to market preferences, it is still possible to leave a mark. His film’s restoration allows us to see the rip, this presence which escapes, as we always do. These days when I cultivate memories, – no longer in petri dishes, but in the audiovisual field –, I cannot avoid asking myself: even in the digital era, are the fungi – those symbolical ones – still waiting, ready to cover the rips opened by Odilon and so many other coloured filmmakers? Which stories are we disposed to tell and preserve? And which will we preserve only in blue, green, yellow … And white?
Black Trances, White Fits
By Quemuel Costa
Um é pouco, dois é bom (Brazil, 1970, Première Brasil, Restored Classics), directed by Odilon Lopez, brings us, to a certain extent, a style of linearity and sequence common to the established “classic” or traditional narrative model. However, both the stories which compose the feature, especially near their outcome, begin to present what I will call trance. trance which seems to destabilise some of the naturalistic aspects which the film offers initially; a certain craziness, which might suggest the characteristic effects of a night’s revelry.
I choose the word trance especially in relation to the scene that Crioulo perceives a jester after the party at the house of Loira his romantic partner. This is the most intoxicating moment of the film. At first it seems that only he can see the joker (the result of the character’s trance?). After we see this strange figure, the camera shows the counter-plan, revealing Crioulo’s scared face, looking straight at us, establishing the second break of the character’s fourth wall. The first is precisely the film’s “betrayal” as regards its apparent chronology – as the story’s heroes, Crioulo and Magrão, leave the prison, they come face to face with themselves going back to jail. In this particular scene, we are also the counter-plan. Odilon Lopez thus makes the audience the accomplice of the delirium.
Despite this moment marking a swift progress to the delirium of the second part, Vida Nova…Por Acaso, the trance begins to operate in the film’s first story, Com Um Pouquinho… de Sorte: in the little jokes in the credits and the moments in which the photography turns grey as the story escalates to tragedy. The trance in the second story mostly seems to be associated to a notion of danger and alarm. A tremendous bad trip, which allows the main character to perceive the trap into which he has fallen, and results in Loira and her friends’ outburst. Thus, the film uses the trance as a mechanism to explain white racism and sadism.
Reticence…
by Renan Eduardo
Um é pouco, dois é bom, direção de Odilon Lopez (Brazil, 1970, Mostra Première Brasil – Restored Clássics) is a film divided into two chapters: “Com um pouquinho de… sorte” and “Vida nova… por acaso”. In its episodic structure there are signs that we are dealing with something that doesn’t obey what is considered the “natural” time of things. If, on the one hand, the comma which divides the feature’s title is a signal separating two other elements of the same syntactical function, the reticence which forms the interval of the episodes operates in an interspersed time. Their grammatical function is not a schism, but their charge is something between hesitation and prolongment, the indetermined and the infinite. In fílm material, Odilon Lopez transforms this punctuation mark into poetry. If the subjectivities become delirious with the advance of social misery, can the formal operations (or the film) be contaminated by its dramatic events?
While the first story is marked by the time of Maria’s (Araci Esteves), pregnancy, the editing does not respect the foetus’ development: from one take to the next it jumps from one to eight months pregnancy, for example. As in the second tale, Crioulo (Odilon Lopez) and Magrão (Francisco Silva), as they come out of jail, see their doubles going back to the same place. The narrative which is born marked by its end, produces a sort of eternal return to oppression for those marginal and marginalised bodies. By also adopting his film episteme as marginal, as something that escapes the norm, more than answering this (and other) questions, Odilon invites the audience to move around, to move in a frequency that does not fit in the time of reason or in the logical progress that has imprisoned these bodies, so many times, in obsolete epistemes.
Roda Viva
By Guilherme Rodrigues
The two stories which compose Um é pouco, dois é bom, by Odilon Lopez (Brazil, 1970, Première Brasil Clássicos Restaurados), begin by simultaneously announcing a new start and its end. In Com um pouquinho de… sorte, Maria (Araci Esteves) declares her happiness at leaving the favela where she lives for a brand-new apartment, and her husband Jorge (Carlos Carvalho) announces that if he dies, the apartment will belong to her and their son – as if predicting a tragedy. Meanwhile in Vida nova…por acaso, Crioulo (Odilon Lopez) and Magrão (Francisco Silva), just out of prison, meet themselves returning to jail.
With everyone’s fate sealed, Odilon Lopez’ film is divided between laughter and malaise. There is a certain charm in accompanying Maria and Jorge’s joyful routine, their domesticity and moments of leisure, as well as Crioulo’s joy at the side of his young white partner. They seem like moments out of a commercial, or a fairy tale. The sun shines brightly as Maria and Jorge run through a park carrying balloons till they throw themselves into the grass, smiling. Crioulo is taken to endless high-class places, sustained by his partner.
However, all this happiness is tempered by the initial predictions, which soon materialise. Jorge loses his job, and the auspicious future gives way to insecurity and despair, with the apartment, formerly guaranteed, now at risk; Crioulo’s new moment becomes uncomfortable in the face of the racial question: he is the only black person in the spaces where he has begun to circulate, which gradually get more distant from reality, seeming less and less like parties and more like strange rituals.
Thus, both stories are transformed. The “new life” never materialises, the tranquility of home turns into a desperate struggle for survival, and the parties turn into weirdness. Home, the symbol of peace, becomes an enclosure, and the act of belonging to the upper class, a nightmare. It all ends, goes back to normal, but begins again. Jorge dies as his son is born; Crioulo and Magrão go back to jail, and see themselves leaving it again. In Um é pouco, dois é bom, the characters move, but cannot move on.