DVD Review: Love For Sale (O Céu de Suely)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UjqgzMtUzU

Love For Sale (O Céu de Suely) (2006)
Available from Strand Releasing
By Filipe Bessa

Most recent Brazilian films with success abroad take place in urban favelas, or slums, but the world of Love For Sale, directed by Karim Ainouz, is that of the lower-middle-class anytown, miles from the drama of urban poverty. This choice of setting speaks volumes about the emotional lives of the film’s characters, a dull purgatory of hardship far from the drastic contrasts of metropolitan centers.

As such, the film’s directness and simplicity are as profound as the horizon that plainly defines its landscape. The small city of Iguatu is a tiny island on the vast ocean of the sertão, the arid Brazilian backlands. This hinterland outpost is the kind of place where people seem to get stuck, and in that sense it is its own little universe. The appeal of the road is strong, but leaving is no easy task.

We meet Hermila, her baby son Matheuzinho in tow, as she returns to Iguatu from a failed attempt to escape to São Paulo, pinnacle of the urban dream. Glimpses of her long bus journey home offer a palpable sense of the defeat and anxiety that are her baggage. When it becomes obvious that Matheuzinho’s father won’t be following Hermila’s return to Iguatu, she must hastily re-imagine her life as a single mother back at square one. From here the film subtly explores her inner turmoil, and actress Hermila Guedes deftly conveys the measureless layers of her character’s desires and fears. Her youthful unrest is enthralling to watch while she sells raffle tickets for a case of whiskey to local men. It seems everything in Iguatu is a lottery, every dream and desire subject to random luck and poor odds. Hermila follows the city’s chancy nature to its dreadful end when she decides to raffle off a “night in paradise” with herself, saving the earnings to leave once again. The desperation for escape unwittingly estranges her from the few tenuous connections she enjoys, leaving her free but alone.

The actress Marcelia Cartaxo, protagonist of the 1985 film The Hour of the Star, makes a serendipitous appearance in Love For Sale as the mother of the errant husband, putting Hermila’s drama into perspective as Macabéa’s contemporary equivalent. Whereas in the former film we follow Macabéa, a hopelessly backward rural migrant, as she struggles to survive and find the glamorous promise of urban life, here we see her present-day counterpart returning home in failure. Perhaps the new woman is more aware of herself, but her struggle continues to be haunting and presciently symbolic.