In Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s A paixão segundo G.H., Clarice Lispector’s highly philosophical prose finds a cinematic rendering that surpasses all expectations. G.H. is a well-off Brazilian sculptor who, one day, encounters a cockroach in her maid’s closet. Following this incident, she descends into unknown regions of her being. The breakdown – a sort of madness, but also a passion in the religious sense – strips all masks, undoes her completely, and leads her to a new experience of life. The film combines the confessional, the experimental and the psychological to achieve an existential horror with echoes of Ingmar Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).

Set almost entirely in the heroine’s apartment, A paixão segundo G.H. is a stunningly sensorial film with frames and cuts precise as a scalpel, sumptuous camera movements, a constant use of visual distortion, and a sophisticated soundtrack (mixing musical snippets, noises and voice tracks with different densities and textures). Maria Fernanda Cândido – capable of turning the diction of a sentence or the holding of a cigarette into truly cinematic occurrences – offers us an intense, electrifying performance that is the perfect counterpart to the arrested inner journey the film presents.

This is not the first time that Luiz Fernando Carvalho has tackled a work that needs to be adapted for the screen. With his first feature film, “To the Left of the Father” (Lavoura Arcaica, 2001), the Brazilian filmmaker recreated the universe of writer Raduan Nassar’s first novel, preserving the intent, a key element when it comes to dealing with the freedom of licenses in storylines, and the “plausible and believable” in cinematic passages.

However, this time, faced with a story from a different nature, the director takes on an existential work by Clarice Lispector, “The Passion According to G.H.,” to subvert it within the most problematic cinematic imagination: the structure of the male gaze, or rather, the male gaze’s reminiscence of a fascinating subject/object, which has been the subject of hundreds of films throughout cinema history: the representation of women’s catharsis, anguish, pain, and hysteria.

The title of Lispector’s work, which the filmmaker chose to maintain, effectively speaks of passion understood as suffering, torment, rapture, and frenzy. The plot of Lispector’s book, published in 1964, and therefore of Carvalho’s work, is sustained by G.H.’s death drive—a sophisticated, upper-class woman who unravels after dismissing the only domestic worker she had, an Afro-descendant woman.

Luiz Fernando Carvalho and Maria Fernanda Cândido provoke a “Clarice Lispector ‘s enthrallment” through spoken word.

Creating a film version of “A Paixão Segundo G.H.” by Clarice Lispector could be a disaster, like a punishment to the nastiest sinner in Dante’s hell.

After all, this is one of the most reflective and with less imagery romances in the history of Brazilian literature—an unmatched deep dive into a white, wealthy, privileged woman’s mind who finds out in an incident as she faces a dead cockroach, a life impulse that is familiar to her and to everything that lives and breathes. 

“I was leaving my inner world and getting into the world,” as G.H. states in one of her never-ending memorable sentences in a never-ending memorable book. How do you film something so unique?

The movie director, Luiz Fernando Carvalho, willingly took on this Herculean task—guided by some sense of mission, designed by destiny, or some sort. In fact, it worked against all the odds.

To explain how he did it — consider a final material that lasts more than two hours of, basically, monologue —  is on another level. It’s worth mentioning that he is the same director who successfully took three of the brightest hours of Brazilian cinema, creating a film version of another challenging book, “Lavoura Arcaica,” at the beginning of the century.