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.

“Bonequinho” gives a standing ovation to Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s adaptation of Clarice Lispector’s book.

If the viewer loses his ground, his breath, his plumb line during “The Passion According to G.H.”, he can relax. It is on the right path traced by the inspiring work of Clarice Lispector, which was written 60 years ago. Even so, it is worth counting on polarized reactions. GH’s subjects, without a lifeliner, will have to embark on an almost hallucinogenic verbal, visual and sound trip, while unsuspecting heretics will drift, eventually bewitched — by the beauty of the text, the multifaceted structure of the narrative and the magnetism of Maria Fernanda Cândido’s delivery.

In the bourgeois imaginary, the maid’s room is a territory of exclusion. Although it is part of the house or apartment, this substitute for the slave quarters is a place where the bosses rarely enter and care little about it. In architecture, it is equivalent to the myth that the maid is “part of the family”, but a separate part, which must remain segregated from the other rooms, from which she is separated by the kitchen and the service area.

In Brazilian cinema, the maid’s room has made significant appearances in films such as “Que Horas Ela Volta?”, “Domestica, “Do Outro Lado da Cozinha”, “Recife Frio”, “Domingo” e “Casa Grande”. Never, however, has it gained as much prominence as in “Passion According to G.H.”, a transposition of the book of the same name by Clarice Lispector done for the cinema by Luiz Fernando Carvalho. Here the maid room becomes the scene of a lugubrious epiphany for the owner of the house, who had not entered in it for years.

At this point, even those who haven’t read The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector, knows what it’s about: the sculptor G.H., a beautiful woman from Rio elite, enters the room of the recently fired maid and experiences an upside-down epiphany when she comes across a cockroach. She dives herself into the wild heart of life. More important than this scarce excerpt is what the writer makes of it: a desperate search to transcend the limits of verbal language, through a writing that unravels and remakes itself at all times.

The challenge that filmmaker Luiz Fernando Carvalho set himself seemed insurmountable. After all, how to transform the anguish and reflections of a woman, alone in a huge apartment and in front of the “corpse” of a cockroach, into a film that lasts more than two hours?

Because the 63-year-old director from Rio de Janeiro, a restless creator prone to facing immense challenges, managed to transform “The Passion According to G.H.”, a novel that Clarice Lispector published in 1964, into an original, engaging film of immense poetic force.

To achieve such a good result, the filmmaker had the complicity of his protagonist, actress Maria Fernanda Cândido. Owner of singular beauty, the interpreter of G.H. shows that Carvalho hit the nail on the head when he invited her, 22 years ago, for the role. At that time, Maria was just a woman of rare beauty, who established herself as an actress in the soap opera “Esperança”.

Feature film based on a novel by Clarice Lispector captures the speech that seeks to give shape to the chaos of the narrator of ‘The Passion According to G.H.’ (…)

Carvalho’s feature film apprehends this disorganization that leads the protagonist to no longer know who she is and that is replicated in a disorganization of speech. Hence, the book takes on a spiral shape, which begins and ends with dashes, indicating a circular rather than linear continuity, and repeats, at the beginning of each chapter, the final sentence of the previous one, in addition to resuming, at all times, issues already dealt with.

The film also moves in a spiral, sometimes not respecting the order of the book — which is not a demerit, but demonstrates an understanding of the narrative structure that Clarice sets in motion. It is not by chance that the very image of the spiral is evoked at the opening of the film. The first time we see G.H., her figure appears distorted, spiraled, as if her body melted before our eyes, giving us to see the loss of the “human montage” of which she speaks.

What do we do and think when we are “alone”, how to express this mental world populated by “vast emotions and imperfect thoughts”? How do experiences become a gush of words and speeches and these can become body, performance and images: cinema?

G.H., Clarice Lispector’s character who takes the body and voice of Maria Fernanda Cândido, is the protagonist, confined, of a book published in 1964 and now transcreated for the cinema by Luiz Fernando Carvalho.

In the book and in the film, perhaps the “reason” that detonates this individual and/or collective “being alone”, narrated with ferocity, is less important: the maid who decides to leave, the visceral encounter with a cockroach, the end of a passion, or, we might add: a devastating pandemic or simply chance or everyday banality in person. The decisive thing is that “it” overflows into an event, in the sense of that which breaks our bodily and psychic automatisms, and produces something too terrible, too beautiful, too distressing.

Literature has inspired director Luiz Fernando Carvalho since the beginning of his career. In his works for cinema and television, literary writing is a fundamental starting point, which has materialized in projects based on the works of Raduan Nassar (“Lavoura Arcaica”), Machado de Assis (“Capitu”), Graciliano Ramos (“Alexandre and Other Heroes”), Eça de Queiroz (“Os Maias”) and Milton Hatoum (“Dois Irmãos”), among others.

In common, in addition to the literary origin, the visual and language experimentation, but none as radical as the film “The Passion According to G.H.”, which is now in theaters. Created from the book by Clarice Lispector, the feature began to be drafted in 2001 and became a de facto project when the writer’s son, Paulo Gurgel, asked Luiz Fernando to take it to the cinema.

Maria Fernanda Cândido is a film power that takes on calculated myopia.

With the passing of the decades and the expansion of the popular cult of her work (or at least the work attributed to her on social networks), Clarice Lispector has become a kind of “elemental woman” of Brazilian culture. Not that her difficult and internalized narratives fit comfortably into this position – and where did Clarice fit comfortably, in her entire life and legacy? One has to question, as it does, how much the experience of the white daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, who spent most of her life in comfortable economic conditions, represents the femininity of a country permeated by inequalities and diversities that are so deeply defining of our identity.

The main actress is stupendous in the role of the white and privileged woman who goes through an epiphany, created by Clarice Lispector.

A classic of literature turned into a movie. Scheduled to premiere on April 11, The Passion According to G.H. is pure poetry. Clarice Lispector’s work won its audiovisual version at the hands of director Luiz Fernando Carvalho, who had already done the same feat, with Lavoura Arcaica (2001). The script is signed by him in partnership with Melina Dalboni.

“Passion According to G.H.” (Brazil, 2023) is in the BAFICI international competition. Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s second feature film premiered at the Rio de Janeiro Film Festival and was also screened at the São Paulo and Rotterdam Film Festivals. His distant debut film, Lavoura arcaica (To the Father’s Left, Brazil, 2001), received a special mention from the jury at the Buenos Aires festival in 2002 and also won the audience award.

“To the Left of the Father” made Carvalho a legendary figure of Brazilian cinema. Dedicated to television since the eighties, when film production was reduced in his country, he had stood out as director of the first part of “O Rei do Gado” (The King of Cattle, 1997-1998), a telenovela on agrarian social themes by Rede Globo. After that success he decided to return to the cinema within the framework of the resurgence or resumption of national production with the fiscal stimulus law of 1993. It resolved the crisis created by the closure of the state-owned company Embrafilme by the government of Fernando Collor de Mello in 1990.

The movie “The Passion According to G.H.” is better than the novel on which it is based. It is with clear images that director Luiz Fernando Carvalho gives materiality to Clarice Lispector’s opaque abstractions.

The director is faithful to the writer’s murky and dull prose. Nor does it cheapen the plot, inventing lines or characters. What the film does is accentuate scenes and themes so that they become the nerves of the plot.

The “Passion” of the title does not refer to exacerbated romantic love. It refers to the Gospels, to the Way of the Cross of the Nazarene, to his inevitable death to redeem the sins of humanity.

“Where the philosopher loses his breath, she [Lispector] continues, even further, beyond all knowledge.” Hélène Cixous

“Every passion is a farewell ceremony and, at the same time, a rebirth.” » Luiz Fernando Carvalho

Taking Clarice Lispector’s novel to the cinema or the theater is not easy and, however, she is one of the most visited authors by filmmakers from both disciplines [i]. The difficulty arises from the fact that, beyond the existential crisis of the protagonist, what happens are pure ruminations; pure philosophy, if you will. A lot of text that necessarily, but not only, has to be transferred to the screen or the stage in a verbal display that could go against the very essence of cinema or theater. It could, but not in the hands of Carvalho, who has turned the novel into a wonderfully cinematic piece. A jewel, if one manages to go beyond that first strangeness caused by a story with an aspect ratio of 1.33:1, with absolute close-ups and a thickness of words -and, sometimes, also of image- that it is necessary to go through.

During the Rio Festival 2023

When the Ukrainian writer, naturalized Brazilian, Clarice Lispector launched her work “The Passion According to G.H.” in 1964, she would not have imagined that her story would be transposed to the cinema in such a poetic and ethereal way by filmmaker Luiz Fernando Carvalho, the most methodical, most aesthetic and who most transcends his own image. Nor that her main character was “possessed”, literally, by the actress Maria Fernanda Cândido. Yes. And there are still those who say that his books are easy to translate. No, they are not, on the contrary, seen the number of existentialist layers, which explicitly flirt with the possible absurd, with reality dismembered in surreal and believable ideas-thoughts (at the same time), with the fantasy that evokes the metaphor of life and its swarming symbols of our mental synapses. All this complexity is in the film version of “The Passion According to G.H.”, which takes the form almost ipsis litteris, due to the literalness of his words, his actions and his “trips” to a psychological-psychedelic.

“The Passion According to G.H.” is a deep journey into the labyrinth of Clarice Lispector’s existence, director Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s newest film adaptation is a fascinating film adaptation of Clarice Lispector’s renowned novel of the same name, bringing to the screen the fragmented mind and existential daydreams of the protagonist in a synesthetic and challenging way. Luiz Fernando Carvalho, in addition to being a director, is the screenwriter and producer of the film, and he manages to make the film dive into the depths of the subjectivity of G.H., a sculptor who is played by Maria Fernanda Cândido, whose life is transformed after a disturbing encounter in her own home.

Text, interpretation and image. Clarice Lispector was always running away from the obvious message.

What he wrote and why he wrote it became the embryo of his meanings — meanings that are sought in his fictions, chronicles, interviews, theatrical and cinematographic adaptations. From her emblematic debut novel Near the Wild Heart (1943), which earned her comparisons to Virginia Woolf, to the renowned novel The Hour of the Star (1977), rekindling an old debate about the writer’s intellectual distance and the so-called social problems, the writer placed in the sign of language the possibility of the word being understood in different ways, at all times that his work and his figure were/are used by others.

“The Passion According to G.H.”, timidly premiered in theaters at the hands of Nitrato Filmes, but you can’t miss it because it is one of the best Brazilian films of recent years, which combines cinema, in particular by Luiz Fernando Carvalho, with one of the greatest names in Brazilian literature of the twentieth century: Clarice Lispector.

“The Passion According to G.H.”, by Luiz Fernando Carvalho is a film based on the book of the same name by Clarice Lispector, which is already a very complex work and has been little considered to make a possible adaptation to the cinema. In fact, Luiz Fernando Carvalho — following in a way the precepts and lyricism of his previous film “Lavoura Arcaica” (2001), based on the work of Raduan Nassar — carries out an almost impossible mission, providing us with an impeccable technical virtuosity and an almost visceral sensation, a hallucinating journey through image, sound and above all the powerful words of Clarice Lispector.

What is left when we leave all the masks? The essence. It is precisely the human essence and its own deconstruction that Maria Fernanda Cândido seeks in “The Passion According to G.H.”, a new film by Luiz Fernando Carvalho that arrives in Brazilian cinemas after a long period of gestation.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Clarice Lispector and was faithfully transposed to the cinema, with Clarice’s writing as the primary script. Each letter, each word that Maria Fernanda says comes from the writing and the inner universe created by the author for her character.

A sculptor with Greek countenances locked up in her flat in Rio de Janeiro confronts ‘that woman’, herself, with a violent critique of the human race in a monologue, from the book to the film of the same name, “Passion According to G.H.” (Luiz Fernando Carvalho).

Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) published the romance in 1964 and Brazil knew a military dictatorship. Ten years later, Maria Fernanda Cândido was born. Similarities between the actress and the writer: faces with similar proportions, accentuated cheekbones, light and almond-shaped eyes; they were mothers of two children of the same ages; and at the time of writing and filming they were both 44 years old.

Film adapts with class the power of language in Lispector’s novel

It is not necessary to develop much to say that Clarice Lispector’s writing is one of the most striking in Brazilian literature. The work of the writer from Pernambuco is one of the densest in contemporary national production, so subjective that it sometimes bumps into the misunderstood. The torrent of thoughts that Clarice writes – especially in The Passion According to G.H. – makes the adaptation a challenge, although the homonymous feature film shows that it is not impossible.

The work of linguistic transposition is never a trivial task. Especially when we talk about Clarice Lispector, whose narratives put on stage, to a greater or lesser extent, the impossibility of the word expressing what is desired. Luiz Fernando Carvalho accepted the challenge and carried it out with his usual competence, taking upon himself the difficult mission of bringing to the screen a narration whose greatest line of strength is the failure of expression in the face of the complexity of existence. It is the narrator-protagonist herself, at a certain point in the book, who says it: “The unspeakable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails do I get what it did not achieve” (LISPECTOR, 2009, p. 176)