https://rollingstone.com.br/cinema/morte-e-vida-madalena-critica/

From the title, the film evokes Severine Death and Lifefrom João Cabral de Melo Netosuggesting a journey of survival and creation that crosses the body and soul of the protagonist. Madalena She is a woman who needs to move forward even when everything around her threatens to fall apart. Each setback on set becomes a test of endurance, a rite of passage that forces her to rediscover strength where there no longer seemed to be any.

Fatigue, despair and improvisation accumulate, but they also reveal the ability to transform dreams into premonitions and ruin into insistence. The act of filming and continuing to produce thus becomes a metaphor for pregnancy — of the film and of the child —, as if the two lives she carries depended on each other to exist. The chaos of the production mirrors the character’s emotional disorder, uniting artistic creation and personal experience in a narrative about persisting when everything seems to fall apart.

Relative finds comedy and humanity in every mishap: in the disorganized crew, in the director’s abandonment, in the problems that accumulate on the set. This good humor is what sustains the film — a laughter that springs from tension and persistence, celebrating independent filmmaking through one struggle after another: obtaining financing, improvising a weapon for a scene, dealing with an unexpected strike or the whims of an exhausted and unmotivated crew. Everything seems about to collapse, but it is precisely this precariousness that Death and Life Madalena extracts its vitality — as in the animated sequence in which Madalena confesses what led her to make films. Relative transforms chaos and dreams into energy, and the repetition of failure into resistance, a way of reaffirming that cinema remains possible, even when everything conspires against it.

Noah Bonobain a captivating and spontaneous performance, is the beating heart of this tragicomedy. Her presence is political: a trans woman at the center of a narrative that talks, above all, about work, mourning and creation. Relative He films her with respect and tenderness, allowing her to exist in all her complexity: fragile and determined, chaotic and lucid, human above all, with good doses of irony and sincerity. “I only gave you a chance because I had no other alternative“, he says to a troubled actor — a line that condenses the acidic and affectionate tone of the film. His performance gives the work a certain spirituality, while Relative transforms your journey into a mirror of your own craft: just as Madalena and its pregnancy, independent cinema also needs care, time and gestation to continue existing — and resisting.

THE mise-en-scène of Relative reflects the balance between realism and fantasy experienced by the protagonist and also by the B-movie sequences in production. Light, shadow and movement reinforce the dreamlike dramaturgy, with echoes of horror and melancholy. Dream passages and the taste for sci-fi appear here in a self-conscious way, as if the film itself Madalena tries to conclude that it contaminates the entire reality around it. There is something 8½from Federico Felliniin the most surreal and self-reflective passages — in addition to a hilarious direct reference —, but not as an empty quote, but rather as an affective appropriation of a classic that also questioned the act of filming itself. The soundtrack, sometimes tense, sometimes absurd, amplifies this confusion between the set and life, making the filming an extension of fiction — or vice versa.

In the end, Death and Life Madalena is a good-humored tribute to independent cinema and those who make it exist. Between the chaos of production and the strength of the protagonist, Guto Parente builds a sensitive work guided by tenderness and the awareness that filming, in times of uncertainty, is an act of resistance. His look at cinema as a space for invention — where failure can be raw material — reveals that giving birth to a child and giving birth to a film are gestures of the same nature: triumphs of persistence, dedication and love for art, but also of the courage to continue believing in the power of creation, even when the world around us insists on collapsing.