 |
A MIRACLE THAT TRANSFORMS THREE BLIND LIVES
The sentiment repeated like a mantra in "Born to Be Blind," a years-in-the-making documentary portrait of three sisters, blind from birth, who sing and play the ganza on
the streets of Campina Grande, Brazil, expresses the kind of religious fatalism that often accompanies a life of hardship and poverty.
When Maria Barbosa, the oldest and most voluble of the three, invokes "the will of God" to describe her existence, largely dependent on the kindness of strangers, she voices
a life-sustaining faith. Maria has no use for the notion that the intermarriage of relatives might have had something to do with her condition.
Observing the daily struggles of Maria and her younger street, joining their high, cawing voices in unison to declaim their chantlike songs while shaking rattles, Maria's philosophy seems incontrovertible. Then a small miracle, brought about by the making of the film, briefly transforms the sisters' lives. To their astonishment, they find themselves celebrities pursued by the news media and condescendingly asked what it feels like to be "movie stars."
This strong but muddled Brazilian documentary, which opens a one-week engagement today at the Film Forum in New York, is one of 11 films in Premiere Brazil!, a series of
contemporary Brazilian movies presented by the Museum of Modern Art. Directed by Roberto Berliner, it focuses on Maria, a wizened woman with missing teeth, who looks two decades older than her age (59).
"Born to Be Blind" began as a fragment of "Street Sounds," a television series about street musicians, and was later expanded, with the help of the screenwriter Mauricio Lissovsky, into a short film, released in 1998, that won several awards in Brazil.
Based on its success, the director returned with a digital camera to make a full-length documentary, and it caused the sisters to be "discovered" by the Brazilian music stars
Nana Vasconcelos and Gilberto Gil, who invited them to perform at a festival in SalvadorBrazilian music stars Nana Vasconcelos and Gilberto Gil, who invited them to perform at a festival in Salvador, where they gave three acclaimed
sold-out shows. They went on to tour as the Blind Girls From Campina Grande.
But their celebrity was short-lived. With the money they earned, they moved to a better apartment. Otherwise, their lives didn't change much. The early scenes, which observe
the sisters' daily routine in an apartment located off an
alley, offer no hints of their future fame.
Maria does almost all the talking, and the family history she relates is frustratingly sketchy. We learn that she has been married twice to visually impaired husbands and widowed twice. Her second husband, who died two years into their marriage, was the love of her life. She is still consumed with heartache over his loss and dreams of meeting
someone new. In the film's most intimate moment, Mr.Berliner, who has become the object of her desire, gently dashes her romantic hopes."Born to Be Blind," for all its haphazard structure, takes you about as far inside Maria's world as a film could reasonably be expected to go, but at moments it also feels uncomfortably exploitative. In the final scene, the three sisters strip completely naked and bathe in the ocean for the first time. A gesture that may have been intended toshow the sisters' utter lack of self-consciousness seems
gratuitous and stage-managed.
The movie is not rated.
BORN TO BE BLIND
Directed by Robert Berliner; written (in Portuguese, with English subtitles) by Maur?cio Lissovsky;director of photography, Jacques Cheuiche; edited by Leonardo Domingues; produced by Renato Pereira, Rodrigo Letier and Paola Vieira; released by TV Zero. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South Village. Running
time: 84 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Maria, Regina and Conceição.
Stephen Holden, 23 de Junho de 2004
|
