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Madalena (Madiano Marchetti, 2021)
🕑 Added 2021-05-22 23:36:29 +0000 UTC
I had previously watched half an hour of Madalena during Rotterdam, and although it was certainly impressive enough formally, it left a bad taste in my mouth. First-time director Madiano Marchetti has the beginnings of a sharp visual sense, and Madalena displays a highly unusual sense of place. Set in the farmlands of Brazil, the film is punctuated with the almost electric green of soybean fields in midday. But Marchetti uses these wide open spaces to to convey a paradoxical claustrophobia. As if to signal early on that this world is not what it seems, he shows us a number of emus bobbing their heads up out of the crops, wandering around and looking out of place.
And soon after, Marchetti provides a glimpse of the dead body of Madalena, a local trans woman who has been murdered and dumped in the fields. I was immediately wary that Madalena might another film that uses trans women (especially women of color) as objects of morbid curiosity, people whose social function is, alas, to die -- either so the ostensible transgression of their existence is punished (the hateful, phobia position), or so that the survivors of this violence might learn important lessons about compassion and acceptance (the liberal, "tolerant" position).
As it happens, Madalena complicates this approach, partly by moving through it. The film is a triptych of portraits, showing three people (unknown to each other) who are affected by Madalena's murder. The fact that Marchetti cannot abandon these damaging tropes, and simply do something entirely different, shows just how entrenched they really are. In this sense, Madalena is instructively disappointing, a film that ends up in the right place but has to take some unfortunate detours to get there.
The first part of the film follows Luziane (Natália Mazarim), a friend of Madalena's who works at the bar she frequented. We see her go around to Madalena's place, trying to find her and discovering her apartment open and empty (apart from Madalena's cat). Luziane goes to work, where she has a vision of a glowing Madalena, holding court in the VIP section at the back. From there, the film cuts to Cristiano (Rafael de Bona), the rich son of the local soybean baron. We watch him inject steroids, have an argument about the harvest with his controlling father, and then discover Madalena's body in the field.
Cristiano panics, and although Marchetti doesn't make it explicit, it seems clear that he was having a "down-low" sexual relationship with Madalena. He's less concerned about her death than the possibility that the cops might think he killed her, not to mention the wrath of his dad if the soybean fields are cordoned off by police. So he and a friend return to collect her body in the dark of night, burying her in a shallow grave. Although Marchetti's intent is clear, this is far and away the worst section of the film, both dramatically and in terms of representation. Like an episode of some right-leaning CBS procedural, the trans woman exists not as a human being but as the residue of a crime.
The final segment is focused on Madalena's friend Bianca (Pamella Yule), a trans woman who works as a caregiver for the elderly. She and her two friends -- two cis women, one straight and one gay -- go to Madalena's place and meet a couple of other friends. They collect mementos from among their deceased friend's things, and then Bianca and the other two women borrow a car and drive to a swimming hole in the forest. They share stories about Madalena, splashing around and acting silly.
What is most noteworthy about the Bianca section is the way Marchetti depicts the women's grief. They are obviously sad, Bianca most of all. But they are also eerily calm, as if Madalena's murder -- or the murder of trans women in general -- is simply a fact, something one comes to expect and becomes inured to. (Marchetti ends the film with a statistic regarding the killing of trans women in Brazil, to cement his point.) After showing us two perspectives on Madalena from the outside -- one an idealization, the other an objectification -- the film cedes space for a trans woman to speak for herself. The flaws of Madalena are almost pedagogical, holding the viewer's hand through conventional (cis-heterosexualized) forms of misrepresentation in order to arrive at the proper, subjectivized conclusion. Madalena is very close to understanding its own dilemma, and as such it is a worthwhile artistic symptom of how far we still have to go.
