RAPOSA (REYNARD)

Leonor Noivo is a film director and Patrícia Guerreiro an actress. To make a film about the secret they share – the basis of their friendship – together they decide to create the character of Marta. Their secret is an existential challenge that medicine calls ‘anorexia’. If Raposa (‘fox’ in Portuguese) rejects this designation and prefers to take a detour via an animal metaphor, it’s because cinema has the power to conceive of illness as a way of being in the world, of diverting the handicap into a relationship to space, time and the facts of life – here, the obsession with total control over everything that circulates between the interior and the exterior – food, thoughts and emotions. Embodied by Patrícia, Marta is staged, directed and filmed by Leonor. Marta spends her life counting: the seconds, the calories she ingests, the steps she takes to go and collect her post… While Patrícia’s voice describes and comments on what’s going on inside her character, eonor’s camera films it from the outside. Washing, dressing, preparing her meal… the density of 16mm endows each everyday action with the painful gravity and choreographic sensuality of a spiritual exercise or purification ritual. Somewhere between the portrait of a character and the self-portrait of an actress, and without the slightest rhetoric, Raposa develops a very disconcerting metaphorical meditation on creating fiction – because the insanity of self-control is also the actor’s unreasonable ambition, extolled by Diderot and deplored by Rousseau: to be nothing in order to be able to be anything and to control everything about the other that one becomes. (C.N.)