Lifetime Achievement Award 2007:
Fernanda Montenegro

Thanks, Fernanda
By José Carlos Avellar

Father and son are arguing again at home. It is a difficult conversation. The father can't understand why the son broke with the movement for better salaries and entered the factory to work against the strike. The son can't understand why the father insists on organizing strikes, facing the police, taking part in political activities, losing jobs and going to prison. The father accuses the son of betrayal; the son accuses the father of being an idiot; the father insists, breaking the strike is a betrayal. The slamming of the door in the father's face ends the discussion.

Then the mother, silent all the time in a corner of the frame, her eyes wide open following the fight between her husband and her son, make a half mute comment: "I'm afraid the door will not resist, we will have to buy another one". The loud sound of the door slamming is still in our ears, which makes the mother's voice seem still softer, almost no sound at all. In speaking she eats parts of the words she is saying in the same way a film cuts an image in the middle of the action showing only part of it and letting us guess the other half of the movement.

This almost nothing, this small line at the end of the fight between father and son in Eles não usam black tie (They Don't Wear Black Tie, 1980) by Leon Hirszman, is a good starting point to appreciate the movie acting of Fernanda Montenegro.

"Veja esta canção" (Rio's Love Song, 1994)

Fernanda is Romana, wife of Otávio, mother of Tião. The brief comment at the end of the discussion is not a joke (as it could seem when we just take the words without the image to which they belong). A real ironic observation is the one made to the workers changing the doors and everything else in the apartment in Tudo bem (Everything's Alright) by Arnaldo Jabor (1978). Fernanda is Elvira, married to Juarez, a retired middle-class man who spends the nights talking to the phantoms of his youth and writing letters against social disorder to the newspaper. Not so happy with life, Elvira thinks that true happiness stays with the poor men rebuilding the apartment. They are about to eat when she comes to say that their very simple food should taste wonderful: "Beans, rice, a banana, some pieces of fried fish. A homemade lunch is much better than sophisticated restaurant's menus". And Elvira sees two other advantages in the life of the poor worker; they do not need to go out of the working place to lunch — "it is practical to work and to eat in the same place"; and if there are something to fix at home they do it themselves: "you do not need to engage anyone, you are workers so you can fix a broken door or window". Here, even if the lines have a precise and complete sense, the exact meaning still depends on the way of saying the words. To see Elvira making those comments is to understand that she is saying that she does not know what she is saying. Fernanda here is not only the housewife talking to the workers. She is both the character and the actress. She does not know what she is saying and simultaneously she knows that she does not know it and that the audience should know what Elvira is not able to know. Elvira is not ironic; she is just stupid. Fernanda does not only play a stupid woman; she comments in the playing of how stupid this woman is.

In Eles não usam black tie the whispered short sentence about the door is not ironic. It is not a funny and ironic way to cut the tense moment just finished. More than never, the sense of this line is not in the meaning of the words but in the way the actress says them. The words become film material: we see the frame, the lights and shadows, the timing, the editing made by Fernanda.

No direct comment on the fight between her husband and son could express better the double suffering of Romana, as wife and as mother. There are no right words, or any word is good: what she feels can only be said beyond a sentence, through the cinema, filming the words.   

Film actors do not only act for the camera, but with the camera; in a more precise way, they are the camera. This special thing the actors and actresses are used to doing — to be simultaneously themselves and another persona — is a little more complicated in cinema: they need also to be (and also at the same time) a third persona, a third an invisible persona, the camera.

Hirszman knows well (because he worked with her in his first feature film, A falecida, The Death, 1965) how easily Fernanda Montenegro transforms herself in front of a camera; he knows she is this special kind of moviemaker-actress every director wants to work with. In A falecida, as Zulmira, the woman whose dream of happiness is to have a first class funeral. She madly decides to became ill and die as soon as possible to finally be happy. In A falecida, Fernanda has unforgettable silent moments — smiling up at the sky in the middle of strong rain, praying to catch a cold; or whispering the words. In the beginning, when the cards says she must pay attention to the blond woman, Zulmira reacts with two half words, something like "hol'G'd" with an incredible voice control to eat the thing she is saying and still make possible the understanding the text: "Holy God!".

That is why in Eles não usam black tie Hirszman uses scenes like the one where the two men are shouting at each other, while a woman that says nothing remains the central character of the scene. Later, a little before the son leaves the house for ever, Fernanda/Romana says a tender farewell to the son, as quietly as in the comment on the new door. Still later, after Tião is gone forever, and Otávio and Romana are alone at home, she keeps as silent as during the fight between her husband and her son while cleaning the beans for the dinner. The truth is that the things she says to the son and the gestures she makes with the hand over the beans on the kitchen table are meaningless. These things have special significance because of the actress.

Certainly Fernanda/Romana was in Carlos Diegues' mind when he invited her to be in the fourth story of Veja esta canção (Rio's Love Song, 1994). We can see this episode, Samba de um grande amor, as a kind of homage to her: she plays a housewife who sings when she is cooking at home. A young man in the street where Fernanda sings while she cooks, falls in love with her voice. He then goes from apartment to apartment, searching for his love, flowers in hand, to declare his passion to the singing woman.

Walter Salles cast her as Dora, the retired teacher that make some extra money writing letters for very poor and illiterate people, in Central do Brasil (Central Station, 1996). Josue, the boy doesn't want to speak to her because she never sent the letter his mother wrote to his father.

"Tudo Bem" (Everything's Alright, 1978)

Two different characters: in Diegues' film she is the woman with a beautiful voice who talks almost as a tender and sensitive mother to the young man in love with a woman he has never seen. In Salles' film she is not at all a sensitive woman that little by little goes through a 'resensibility process' (to use the director's words) guided by a child looking for the father it has never seen. She is invited to create a simple persona, or at least a brief encounter with a character, in Diegues' episode of Veja esta canção. She is a much more complex character in Salles' Central do Brasil. And she is right for both films; as a housewife who teaches a brief lesson about what is this thing called love, a teacher who learns with a young boy the same thing.

Maybe every time Fernanda comes to a film now she remembers she once was Zulmira, searching happiness in a first class funeral, maybe because she remembers she once was Elvira changing doors and windows in the apartment and that she once was Romana, worried about the fragile door at home. Maybe, making films for her is a kind of memory game: she brings to every new persona a small part of her many previous cinema lives. Every new character has something of the experience of an earlier one.

And so the memory of being Zulmira facing a fortuneteller was alive in the moment she played a short scene as a kind of fake magician in A hora da estrela (Hour of the Star) by Suzana Amaral (1987). And still something of Dora, Elvira, Zulmira could be seen in Regina, the lonely police informer in Do outro lado da rua (The Other Side of the Street) by Marcos Bernstein (2004) and the daughter Maria in Casa de areia (House of Sand) by Andrucha Waddington (2005). Maybe it is a conscious memory; maybe it is an unconscious memory.

What is certain is that today after seeing Fernanda in a film we spontaneously remember other personas she created before: the housewife who cooks and sings, the fortune teller eating candies and seeing the hour of star, the retired teacher writing letters in Central Station, the lonely police informer all the time looking through the windows, the housewife worried about the fragile door, the housewife rebuilding her home or the other one making a castle of sand — among many others. Because she opened (and is still opening) doors to characters that became all our neighbors, we just want to say: Thanks, Fernanda.  

José Carlos Avellar
© FIPRESCI 2007

top