November 21, 2009
LIMITE (1931)
Director: Mario Peixoto
Country: Brazil
Genre: Drama
Length: 120 minutes
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"Three people sail aimlessly while remembering their past"... and so begins the most fascinating and breathtaking experimental film ever made by Brazil. Mario Peixoto must be one of the most mysterious filmmakers of all time, even more than F.W. Murnau, whose 10 films were completely destroyed. In the case of expressionist Peixoto, the film he directed in his career was Limite, and if this wasn't enough, a segment of Limite is already considered as totally lost. The length of the following review will be ultimately reduced because of its nature. It is a ride that must be left to the responsibility of the viewer. The point primarily consists in allowing the feature film itself to talk by its own. However, the philosophical beauty, the unparalleled mysticism, the subjectivity of the events and its predominant simplicity make of this absolute South American masterpiece the most breathtaking experimental achievement in the entire history of the motion picture, one of the most inventive and innovative silent films ever made, and one of the best directed dramas of all time.
The first 10 minutes of the film give a cathartic foreshadowing of what the remaining 110 minutes have prepared for the audience. Mario Peixoto takes what may seem, at first glance, a merely existentialist concept and portrays it through the eyes of a poet. Beauty is relative, and the sources of happiness are endless. We are introduced to two women and a man recalling their respective pasts and the hardships they went through. Regardless of the events, misadventures and disappointments they had to experience, the first thing that is left clear is the fact that they desperately sought for nothingness. To be in the middle of nothingness, regardless of the means, is their psychological escapism of a mistreating society. The first image shown is the female protagonist starring at the camera with a dark background and showing her pair of handcuffed hands. A conclusion stating that their freedom has been chained to their pessimistic view towards life itself may be drawn. Interestingly enough, the opening sequence is so beautifully and unbelievably filmed, that heavy tears start to fall down. We haven't built empathy towards their personalities; we do not who they are, either. We do not know their origins and we are not even invited to even contemplate the possibility that the actions they had executed are evil. They are unbeknownst characters to us.
With this premise of sadness and solitude, the hypnotic flashbacks begin. However, it is a known fact that complexity comes from simplicity itself. Peixoto's brilliance in narrative and storytelling is originated from the non-chronological portrayal of the events. We get, sometimes, more than one revisiting to a particular past in order to subtract the emotional elements that govern their mentalities. A character is mistreated and escapes from jail while another character walks through a long road to nothingness surrounded by the humidity and the darkness of the trees. Footsteps are left in the beach only to be erased by the constant arrival of the waves to the shore. The characters cry. The characters escape. Their fates are destined to collide and share a final destiny of ultimate doom. The see will swallow them eventually, or perhaps it won't. Perhaps it will be something else. Hunger will conquer their stomachs, or a storm will consume them. Nothing matters now. Even if they reach a destination, the most probable thing is that they will sail back to the middle of the dangerous sea.
At what extent can rejection and denial are capable of physically driving a person to accept such fate and to surrender the previous one? The same question goes for three people, simultaneously. Mario Peixoto grabbed the notorious and still early influences of Russian and German silent filmmaking and composed an orchestra of his own. The vastness of the sea is highlighted by one of the most sentimentally depressing musical scores ever committed to celluloid. The existence of a legendary, avant-garde film like Limite owes credit, besides to the cast, to Mario Peixoto alone, who was the editor, the producer, the screenwriter, the director and, of course, a supporting character. The technique of putting the flashbacks on the screen resorted to an Eisensteinian cinematography with a less aggressive editing and a revolutionary camera work that patiently follows the tracks of the characters walking slowly. At one time, an extended contemplation of the beautiful natural scenery of Brazil is shown and, at the next moment, the camera is spinning vertiginously in full circles until colliding with the loss of hope of the characters once again. An omniscient perspective is offered, like if God were watching these abandoned souls all the time. Particular sequences of images are repeated several times, just like master Sergei M. Eisenstein used to do, in order to increase the dramatic quality, and the conclusion is, first and foremost, equally powerful.
Considering that we get to know the events that drove the characters to literal madness, we are just shown rather small portions. We are told the exact drop that overflowed the glass, but the explanation of the remaining water can be found in the realm of the unknown, of the dreams and a vivid imagination. The film structure shows three people in a small boat, memories, the people rowing senselessness, more memories, mysticism and gloominess, the people crying... it is a cycle. Limite reaches such a degree of experimental expression that it can also be subject to multiple interpretations, but the ideas behind the curtain have remained the same even nowadays. Death has its victory so assured, that God has given us the chance to live a life. It is an unforgettable journey where Heaven collides with Hell and perdition falls in love with visual beauty. A unique feast for the senses that would definitely influence directors from Andrei Tarkovsky (Zerkalo [1972], Stalker [1979]) to Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven [1978], The Thin Red Line [1998]), Limite is a seminar on cinematography and, easily, one of the best 20 films ever made. Grandiosity has found a language.
100/100
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