An extraordinary silent feature from Brazil set to a playlist of classical music, so unique, enigmatic and dreamlike that it still carves out new, profound possibilities for cinema.
Review #2,693
Dir. Mario Peixoto
1931 | Brazil | Silent, Experimental | 118 min | 1.37:1 | Portuguese intertitles
Not rated – likely to be PG
Cast: Olga Breno, Tatiana Rey, Raul Schnoor
Plot: In a small boat, three shipwrecked people, two women and a man recall their recent past. In a series of flashbacks, they reveal their stories.
Awards: –
Source: Film Foundation
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Memories, Love & Fate
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex/Elliptical
Pace: Slow
Audience Type: Niche Arthouse
Viewed: Criterion Blu-ray
Spoilers: No
For a long time inaccessible and thought to be a mythical relic of silent cinema, Mario Peixoto’s only feature finally sees daylight with its restoration included as part of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project. What a gift to cinephiles this is. It’s almost like discovering a new way to think about cinema.
Sparked by an image (from a French magazine) of a man’s hands in handcuffs positioned around a woman’s head with glaring eyes, Peixoto crafts out an indelible dreamlike piece that begins with a man and two women left adrift on a boat.
Through flashbacks, we see memories of these strangers’ lives. How they got together on that boat isn’t important; instead, Peixoto uses all manner of film language (e.g. jump cuts, subjective camerawork), frequently to the point of visual and narrative abstraction, to give us what may be described as an anti-narrative.
Yet these were two of the most immersive hours of expressive avant-garde filmmaking I had ever experienced, lulling me into a daze that continued even many hours later. It’s the cinematic equivalent of being pleasurably drunk.
If you are a fan of classical music, Limite has one of the greatest playlists of the genre, albeit one that seems to be perpetually on repeat. The use of Erik Satie’s melancholy ‘Gymnopedie No. 3’ is particularly sublime, and in fact, we hear it on multiple occasions, perfectly instilling a contemplative mood from the get-go.
There is also Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and more. At some point in the film’s seamless oneiric visual-music flow, viewers are likely to surrender to the experience, which resembles an eternal stream of consciousness.
Some might argue that Limite goes one step further—that it taps into the unconscious. Whatever it is, Peixoto’s work remains suggestive of the profound possibilities it lays for cinema.
It is at once a promising blueprint and a full-blown thesis, an unexpected gift from a 23-year-old Brazilian with as imaginative a brain as any.
Grade: A
Promo Clip:
Music:
Eternality Tan 