On Playing (2007)

Dir. Eduardo Coutinho – Brazil – Documentary & Docufiction

I tend to scald talking heads documentaries for just being interviews. It always just seems a shame to sit someone down and ask them questions, then to cut all the questions out, leaving a weird exam-answer story left at the end. With no threads running through, or any consideration given to the fact that the story is still a story, regardless of truth, it becomes just a collection of facts and details. Talking head films use the medium to its utter minimum – not to assign them a value – but they lack what makes film film.

Coutinho understands this, and simply and totally deconstructs the philosophy behind talking heads, using the traditional stylistic disadvantages to its betterment. The subjects and players exist in the same arena: the void of the theatre, with rows of anonymous red butacas surrounding them. Stories are told linearly cutting between what we are told each are the real people and the actors imitating them, so seamless that they blur and are indifferentiable. Moments from the same stories are exclusive, and then seconds later Coutinho breaks his own rules and lets two tell the same part of the story.

The women’s stories orbit the same topics: motherhood and loss. They recount what they wanted from life when they were 3, 5, 10 years younger, their plans, what they wanted to achieve. In the face of their struggle some stand their ground, others change becoming candomblecistas, or cry too much at Finding Nemo. It’s a deeply personal film – equally conceivable that either women have been through the same events, or even that they both have. The stories are the same but the details change. Pushed to the banks of the river in the wake of capitalism and progress, rather than drawn along into the flow, it’s a more representative cut of Brazilian society than most films could reach. We are closer in this documentary to the ethnographic reenactments of Flaherty and the beginning of documentary than any other film of the last century. although now we transcend ethnicity – all the players are united by the same struggles against capitalism even with the surging of the pink tide.