A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Friday, July 3, 2026

Vera (Sergio Toledo, 1986)

Ana Beatriz Nogueira in Vera

Cast: Ana Beatriz Nogueira, Raul Cortez, Aida Leiner, Carlos Kroeber. Screenplay: Sergio Toledo, based on a book by Anderson Bigode Herzer. Cinematography: Rodolfo Sánchez. Art direction: Naum Alves de Souza, Simone Raskin. Film editing: Tércio G. Mota. Music: Arrigo Bernabé. 

The title, Vera, is the deadname of Bauer (Ana Beatriz Nogueira), a young transgender man who does what he can to reject it, an even harder task in 1980s Brazil than it is today. Growing up in an orphanage, he writes poems that get the attention of a prominent educator (Raul Cortez), whom he calls "Professor." (The character is based on the economist Eduardo Suplicy.) When Bauer ages out of the institution, "Professor" finds work for him in a research center, where he meets Clara (Aida Leiner) and falls in love with her. The film, based on the life of Anderson Bigode Herzer, flashes back to his struggles in the institution as he faces a different set of obstacles in the outside world.  Sergio Toledo does nothing to mitigate the sadness and pain in the story he tells, although he stops short of the suicide that ended Herzer's life, leaving some hope for Bauer. Nogueira's beautifully sensitive performance won a best actress award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1987. The only real flaw in the film is in framing Bauer's story with gratuitous shots of the launch of a space shuttle (1986 was the year of the Challenger disaster) and atomic explosions, which seem to be an attempt to heighten the story's significance but only distract from it. 

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