A Lonely Song (Film Thoughts: Greta)

greBrasil, under the leadership of Jair Balsonaro, is less kind of the LGBTQIA community. Perhaps that is why there is a new wave of Brasilian queer cinema – they say art gets better with strife. From 2019 comes Greta, directed by Armando Praca, and it is a quiet, contemplative piece of filmmaking. The film centers around Pedro (Marco Nanini) who is an aging gay nurse. He takes care of his friend Daniela, a trans woman suffering from end stage renal disease. But one day, he helps a fugitive from the hospital escape to his house, and they develop a tender relation ship, At times, the film can be a challenging watch – you cringe at Pedro’s decisions, but I felt its overpowering take on loneliness, how sometimes when you are alone in life, you just cling to whatever that is that you gives you a sense of intimacy. The slow pace is deliberate and it took time to get into its groove, but by the end you will be all in. The film feels like a melancholy fado song, tinged with sadness and pain. It’s heartbreaking.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s