‘STAR’: RUTHLESS LOOK AT UGLY DUCKING

We almost reflexively tend to expect some qualities in film “heroines,” and 19-year-old Macabea, of Suzana Amaral’s “Hour of the Star” (at the Monica 4-Plex), reverses almost all of them. She’s pasty-faced, dull-eyed. Her nose is red. Her body is broad and lumpy. She smells bad. She’s unattractive, passive, an orphan from Brazil’s impoverished northwest who works with minimal competence at a Sao Paolo office job. She befriends people who abuse and manipulate her and seems ill-equipped for life.

How does she see herself? “A typist and virgin who likes Coca-Cola.” What are her pleasures? To eat guava preserves with cheese, to listen to classical music and educational programs on the radio, to see an occasional movie. Who are her lovers and friends? Olimpico, a bullying, vain little gamecock who flirts with and then callously dumps her; three girls named Maria who share her bare, dark room, and Gloria, her ugly, but voluptuous co-worker--who sends her to fortunetellers and carelessly steals Olimpico’s affections.

Macabea’s life is barren. Few things give it light or grace: her dreams, Strauss waltzes she spins to on the radio, a shop-window wedding gown that draws her gaze. Yet the film itself has a dark radiance. Plunging us into Macabea’s world, it finds idealism, sad humor, and finally a painful ecstasy and illumination. If we dismiss this lonely, sad, inept girl, we lose something strange and beautiful--more beautiful since it seems hidden to any human eye but ours.

In Macabea--played, in a genuinely unforgettable performance, by Marcelia Cartaxo--there’s a yawning gulf between spirit and body. The film, by focusing ruthlessly on the body, ends by poignantly evoking the spirit--as it is hidden, damaged and lost. And there is a spirit, a fragile one, hopelessly incapable of expressing or defending itself.

The women who imagined and re-created “Hour of the Star,” novelist Clarice Lispector (who died at 57) and writer-director Amaral (who makes her feature debut here at 54) come from worlds distant from Macabea’s. Lispector was an ambassador’s wife; Amaral is from a family of Brazilian painters and art critics (she raised nine children before beginning to pursue a film career.) Perhaps they seem too removed or condescending to their character, but this feeling is consciously used. In the book, Lispector mocks the idea of an objective, compassionate narrative voice. She uses an on-stage narrator, the writer and Rio intellectual Rodrigo S. M., as an ironic frame. And Rodrigo is so neurotic that he can barely bring himself to write. He flagellates himself, protests a devotion to his creation, Macabea, that soon seems suspicious and forced.

In the film, Amaral removes the taint of sentimentality in a different way. She and Cartaxo are so pitilessly graphic they leave us no choice; they dare us to accept Macabea, and, in doing so, condemn the twinges of propriety that might make us flinch away in real life. They show her stupidly smudging her typing sheets, nibbling nocturnally at cold chicken while squatting on a chamber pot, moaning unintelligibly as she tries to sing for an unfeeling Olimpicothe radio music she heard and loved.

Amaral’s technique is almost as muted and minimalist as Lispector’s: simple compositions and color variations all caught by cameraman Edgar Moura, the sheenless beginning, the constantly cloudy exteriors, the explosion of color at the end. Her handling of the actors is unerring. (Jose Dumont’s posturing Olimpico is overplayed in just the right style.) Her revealing of character is masterly. Only at the end, when she tries a violent editing effect, does her hand seem intrusive.

Taking this square, full gaze at a seemingly small corner of life, the film becomes, at times, quietly magnificent. It finds something more universal: fears and frustrations that, in different ways, haunt us all. But its singular triumph lies in the performance of Cartaxo--like Amaral, making her film debut. She gives an illusion of a real life: life without prettification or softening, life at its driest and saddest.