FANTASIA OBSCURA: A Brazilian Sex Comedy for Women?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you can have your brigadeiro and eat it, too…
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976)
Distributed by: New Yorker Films (in US)
Directed by: Bruno Barreto
Please note: This piece describes and uses materials from a film that is very frank about intimacy that may make select readers uncomfortable; discretion is advised.
When someone uses the term “sex comedy,” the first image that comes to most people’s heads is a film where we have some man whose sex drive is in overdrive. We follow him as he lives for lust; maybe he’s successful satiating himself, and maybe he learns something from the effort, successful or not.
And along the way, there’s at least one woman who doesn’t have a lot of lines to speak or clothes to wear in the film. These women, from female lead to window dressing, show up, look hot, and then we ignore them as we go back to the protagonist and his needs.
Which was why when this film came out, it was such a startling revelation, to have as protagonist a woman who, unlike most women in sex comedies (or any other film), actually likes sex and isn’t punished for it.
We start with a cold open: It’s 1943, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, early in carnival. We meet Valdomiro (Jose Wilker), getting drunk at an interminably early hour, along with Mirandao (Nelson Xavier) and the rest of the irredeemables of the town. They start to samba as a crew comes by, but Valdomiro’s dance is cut short by a fatal heart attack.
His newly-minted widow, Dona Flor (Sonia Braga) rushes out to hold him one last time, and claim him for his funeral while people dance in the street. And if they could, most of the mourners at the funeral would dance, too, knowing what kind of husband he was…
And for the next hour, we get an extended flashback where we get some of his ‘high’ lights, such as his running off whenever he could to go back to his drinking buddies, no matter what she’d try:
We also get to see some of his other ‘redeeming’ features, such as his abuse, the way he stole money that Dona Flor earned from giving cooking classes, the way he would fondle some of her students as they watched her cook. It makes one ask, what did she see in him?
In short, what kept her from leaving him was his abilities as a lover. Whatever else happens, the sex is so good that she allows him way too much leeway, right up to the moment when he dies.
Widowhood give Dona Flor room to breathe, as well as considerable frustration without her lover. This prompts Dona Flor’s mother (Dinorah Brillanti) and friends to get her set up with another beau as soon as it’s appropriate.
Which doesn’t take long at all. They have no trouble finding their man, Theodoro (Mauro Mendonca), a doctor with a thriving practice, who absolutely adores Dona Flor. And he’s everything Valdomiro was not; he’s sober, level-headed, adores and worships his wife…
…and is lousy in bed. Which for many women might be a deal breaker, but for Dona Flor, it just makes her wistful that Valdomiro isn’t in her life when she needs him..
…so wistful, in fact, that Valdomiro’s ghost shows up, in the nude, right when she doesn’t need him. He’s no less a dick in the afterlife, as he watches Dona Flor and Theodoro making love from atop the wardrobe and heckles them, popping out now and then to help Mirando break the bank at the casino. But his purpose in coming back to this plane gets fulfilled soon enough, as Dona Flor realizes what she wants, deep down, and finally gives in to her desires…
Not that she’s that quick about it. In fact, for a two-hour film, the first half is reliving the flashback in detail, and Valdomiro’s ghost showing up with only 20 minutes to go. In a film that did not take a few moments to watch its characters get carnal and talk about how badly they want it, this would have been fatal, but here it’s just a slow burn.
Adapted from the novel by Jorge Amado, Barreto and his co-writers in adapting the book put most of the focus in the film on Dona Flor. And for a story about lust and the afterlife, Barreto shoots it like a light romp in bright sharply defined colors, with a score by Francis Hime and Chico Buarque that could have been used in an American comedy film with no trouble. By approaching it this way, Barreto allows the audience to relax amidst some intense depiction of female desire, which brilliantly gives her a chance to have her own agency.
And Bragia as Dona Flor allows her character to do what she wants, and want what she wants, quite naturally. In addition to her looks, Bragia also brought a heartfelt performance that makes her character a living, breathing, easy to relate to being, something women in film (with sex drives or otherwise) don’t get much of a chance to be. As powerful as her performance is, she’s generous with herself in that Wilker and Mendonca are never pushed aside when she takes the screen, but actively engaged in give and take with her.
Whether because it was its sexual politics or just a good sex comedy, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands found a receptive audience. The film held a record as the highest grosser among Brazilian films until 2010, and Braga was able to use this role to help break into American films and television, with a career here in the US that’s still quite active.
Sadly, we never got many more Dona Flors onscreen after this. In fact, the likelihood we’d have gotten more daring films with agency in hands we’d never seen before pretty much ended for decades when an American remake of the film came out in 1982:
Talk about frustration…
NEXT TIME: Everyone’s gone to the moon… For the rest of the month, in honor of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, we’re going to look at the films that beat Armstrong and Aldrin to get there first…
…and we’re serious, here; there better not be any funny stuff, or I will pull over this spaceship…
