Clarice Lispector’s story was considered unfilmable, but it arrives in theaters at the hands of Luiz Fernando Carvalho, also director of ‘Lavoura Arcaica’, with Maria Fernanda Cândido as the protagonist – a woman who will fall apart; Read interviews.

The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector, has always been considered an “unfilmable” book. Not for director Luiz Fernando Carvalho and actress Maria Fernanda Cândido, who are longtime partners. The two release the homonymous film this Thursday, 11, in Brazilian cinemas, after showing it at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January.

“I had no hesitation, but I was aware of the size of the challenge,” said the actress in an interview with Estadão, in São Paulo. “I admire Luiz’s courage a lot, because we don’t work comfortably, and this is very faithful to the book. That’s what Passion According to G.H. is.”

Colorful blurs leak the serene but twisted face of Maria Fernanda Candido, in the first seconds of “The Passion According to G. H.”. She soon finds her voice, starting a monologue that transforms 180 pages of paper into two hours of digital record.

Considered by many as an unfilmable example of Clarice Lispector’s collection, the book that serves as the basis for Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s film was published 60 years ago, but found ways to immerse itself in today’s movie theaters that are still very current.

These are essentially human questions that guide G.’s conversation H. com the viewer, after all. This is what Candido believes, who likes the theory of some scholars who say that the protagonist’s name is an abbreviation for “human gender”.

Clarice Lispector’s acclaimed text The Passion According to G.H.. gets a film version, directed by Luiz Fernando Carvalho

The encounter between an inspiring blank canvas, a powerful book in the variety of reentrant words, and even the impactful plasticity of an inspiring actress muse: Maria Fernanda Cândido — all this moved director Luiz Fernando Carvalho in the adaptation for the big screen of one of Clarice Lispector’s classics: The Passion According to G.H. “I don’t start from any cinematographic presupposition; I start from a previous ritual that is simply the presence of a blank canvas”, says the director, in an interview with Correio. “Look, it was a difficult joy, as Clarice would say, but it’s called joy and I feel very fortunate to have been chosen by the director for this fascinating process,” observes actress Maria Fernanda Cândido.

In an interview with GLOBO, the actress tells about her work on the adaptation of Clarice Lispector’s classic considered ‘unfilmable’, in addition to the fear of cockroaches.

Understanding Clarice Lispector, according to her own statement, “is not a matter of intelligence, but of feeling”. She was talking about a Portuguese teacher at Colégio Pedro II who came to her to tell her that he had read “The Passion According to G.H.” four times and continued without knowing what the book was about. “The next day, a 17-year-old university student said that this is her bedside book. I can’t understand it. Either it plays, or it doesn’t”, added the writer in a famous interview given to TV Cultura, in 1977, a few months before she died.

Reviews of two productions from our region that have the female protagonists as their main findings.

If there are “unfilmable” novels, one of them is this one published in 1964 by the Ukrainian-Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. That mattered little to Luiz Fernando Carvalho – a historian of soap operas and director of the multi-award-winning film A la izquierda del padre / Lavoura Arcaica (2001) – who was also in charge of the transposition together with Melina Dalboni for a film that had its world premiere last January during the Rotterdam Festival.

GH (the magnetic Maria Fernanda Cândido, omnipresent in practically all shots) is a sculptor of the elitist Rio de Janeiro bourgeoisie of 1964 who lives in an apartment in Copacabana overlooking the sea. And it is precisely Cândido who carries on his shoulder (or rather takes over with his face and his voice) what is basically a long interior monologue in a kind of video-diary (shot in 35mm) in which he expresses his contradictions, his desires (the stylized narration has an erotic and seductive tone at several moments) and his anguish.

(…) Thus, the second feature film by Brazilian Luiz Fernando Carvalho and the debut feature by his compatriot Sacha Amaral share the podium with two main awards. In the case of this last film, El placer es mío, it is a mostly Argentine production (Amaral has lived in our country for many years), and it is the portrait of a young man in eternal conflict with his friends, family, multiple lovers and with himself with a precise dramatic structure, remarkable performances and a realistic style not without poetry.

A paixão segundo GH, a very personal adaptation of Clarice Lispector’s novel of the same name, marks Carvalho’s return to cinema after two decades of intense work on television in his country. With an extraordinary performance by Maria Fernanda Cândido, who deservedly won the award for Best Performance (for a few years now the award has not distinguished between the sexes), the film describes the inner journey of a woman of high society after having an epiphany in the most unexpected circumstances. Unlike Pleasure is Mine, A paixão… It is an almost experimental film, a collage of memories and desires shot on the beautiful 35mm analogue support.

The awards were announced after a 12-day competition, during which more than 280 films were screened and almost 500 screenings were made at the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, which celebrates its silver anniversary this year.

The Brazilian film A paixao segundo GH, by Luiz Fernando Carvalho, and the Argentine film El placer es mío, by Sacha Amaral, jointly received the Grand Prix of the Bafici 2024 International Competition, whose winners were announced in their entirety this Friday 25.

Artistic making is something very subjective. Therefore, it is not possible to describe in words what the concept of the person who makes art really means. But one thing every artist should have: a differential, a brand. This is how we arrived at director Luiz Fernando Carvalho. This 63-year-old from Rio de Janeiro carries in his baggage several successful productions on television and in cinema. And most of the works drink from a very diverse and relevant source: Brazilian literature, through authors such as Ariano Suassuna.

Passing through Recife, the filmmaker talked to the Giro column about the friendship he had with the author from Paraíba with a Pernambuco heart: “I was very good friends with Ariano Suassuna and I know the whole family to this day. I did several works for television inspired by his work, and with his collaboration, such as A Woman Dressed in the Sun (1994), The Farce of Good Laziness (1995) and The Stone of the Kingdom (2007). I was the one who launched Ariano on television when he was 70 years old”, he points out. “He was a very dear person.”

Luiz Fernando Carvalho returns to the cinema with a challenging adaptation of The Passion According to GH, a book that completes 60 years of release

More than two decades separate the two incursions of Luiz Fernando Carvalho, one of the most important names in Brazilian television dramaturgy, in fictional feature films for cinema. It has been 23 years since the release of his celebrated Lavoura Arcaica, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Raduan Nassar, a period in which his television production continued hand in hand with literature, passing through works by names such as Machado de Assis, Eça de Queiroz and Ariano Suassuna, working with classic narrative structures, even if perhaps at different levels of classicism.

The awards were announced and will be presented this Saturday night.

There was a tie in the Grand Prix.

Bafici reaches its most turbulent end, with a tie for the top prize between the Brazilian film A paixão segundo GH, by Luiz Fernando Carvalho, and the Argentine co-production El placer es mío, by Sacha Amaral.

Carvalho adapted Clarice Lispector’s novel about a Rio de Janeiro sculptor who goes through an existential ordeal when, following a heartbreak, she confronts a cockroach in her maid’s room. Sacha Amaral, also from Brazil, focuses his film on a drug dealer who lives with his mother and steals from people he meets through apps.

“I work directly on literature, I make an incursion of the lens into the book”

Andrés and Nacho: Despite adapting the structure of the original story, you decided to keep the first line. How important was this in the film? How did you construct the rest of the script?

Luiz Fernando Carvalho: There isn’t exactly a script. I don’t think this type of literature, which is poetic prose, requires the mediation of a script. I work directly on literature, making an incursion of the lens into the book. So there isn’t a script; there are coordinates and a very strong prior study, supported by specialists in Clarice Lispector’s work, that help me perceive the novel’s directions. These coordinates help me generate a great creative response from my reading of the novel.