ELA VOLTA NA QUINTA

“She will be back on Thursday”. With its obvious simplicity, the film’s title happens to set the mood of the film, or at least its guiding principle: staying anchored in everyday life. More precisely, the life of Maria José and Norberto, who have been married for 35 years and who live in Contagem, in the suburbs of Belo Horizonte. Their marriage is on the rocks, which leads their two sons to also wonder about the future of their own relationships with their wives. The story is quite ordinary. How can one capture such an imperceptible shift in the heart of the banality of things, only made more noticeable by a crisis? Filming his own family, his own parents, his brother and himself, André Novais Oliveira has chosen to take his time. He shots long sequences, leaving enough time for the fictional situations on which he puts his characters to grow and unfold. Then he uses wide frames to linger on more mundane, concrete or at times farcical moments: eating an orange, cooking, watching television… Under his watchful eye, the subtlety of the variations between two beings slowly appears, enhanced by dialogues drawn from the most ordinary daily life. Slowly but surely, the depth of what is going on organically inside and between the bodies begins to emerge, in the course of the unfolding conversations. (NF) André NOVAIS OLIVEIRA