Melodrama in Playing and Brazilian Peripheral Modernism

Initial Considerations on Realism, Modernism, and Melodrama ¹

Among the themes most traditionally debated in both literary theory and film theory is the relationship between realism and modernism. The subject is vast and complex, but I would like to briefly revisit a few basic points as preliminary considerations for a discussion of the presence of melodramatic elements in Jogo de Cena (in English, Playing), ² a 2007 feature film that synthesizes the work of Eduardo Coutinho—one of Brazil’s leading documentarians, though still largely unfamiliar to foreign critics and audiences.

Despite the internal contradictions of realism and modernism—as discussed by Jameson ³ —realism is commonly understood as an artistic practice that invests in the possibility of representing, whether through verbal or audiovisual language, a world apprehensible to the eye and external to the work itself. In this sense, as developed in nineteenth‑century literature, realist narratives are marked by temporal continuity, a form of transparent appearance, a stable point of view, and sociohistorical contextualization. However, as Jameson emphasizes, social experience at the turn of the twentieth century revealed this conception of realism to be illusory, insofar as “. . . the idea that the literature of realism has the ideological function of adapting its readers to bourgeois society as it currently exists, with its premium on comfort and inwardness, on individualism, on the acceptance of money as an ultimate reality.” ⁴ In other words, art was not merely reproducing reality, but assuming a role in the construction and consolidation of a status quo. Hence the development of modernist art questioned this transparent appearance by exploring artistic mediation in its opacity and autonomy. This distinction between transparency and opacity, in turn, delineated throughout the first half of the twentieth century the distinction drawn between mass culture and modern art—as found, for example, in Adorno and Horkheimer. ⁵ Nevertheless, when we consider cinematic productions—whether in their early stages or in contemporary contexts—the distinction between commodity and artistic dimensions becomes problematic, since they operate in an in‑between space. This is exemplified by the case of Playing, which, from one perspective, aligns with the tendencies of a particular Brazilian market niche of the 2000s by foregrounding themes related to the individual, such as the protagonism of singular subjects, self‑representation, particularization, emphasis on individuals from different social segments, and an approach centered on the director’s personal experience; ⁶ from another perspective, however, it problematizes the conventions of both fiction films and documentary ones in order to reflect on cinema itself.

Returning to nineteenth-century literature, one element that runs through the novels of the period—whether those belonging to the Romantic movement or those associated with the realist movement—is melodrama, ⁷ whose manifestation as a dramatic genre already dates back to the eighteenth century. ⁸ Beyond the genre, however, the definition of melodrama that is of interest in this study is one that originates in literary studies and has been formulated by Peter Brooks to be understood as “a mode of conception and expression, as a certain fictional system for making sense of experience” ⁹ for both the bourgeois and popular classes. With the advent of modernist vanguards, however, melodrama gradually came to be delimited as a form addressed to the masses—thus separated from what could be considered “high culture.” Once again, cinema puts this separation under strain, as can be observed, for example, already in the writings of Eisenstein. ¹⁰ In the 1929 essay “The Filmic Fourth Dimension,” ¹¹ the avant-garde filmmaker states that if, for sounds, we say “I hear,” and if for what is visual we say “I see,” then for the audiovisual we would say, “I feel.” ¹² Moreover, in a note added to the essay “The Structure of the Film,” ¹³ from 1939, the Russian thinker and filmmaker goes so far as to make explicit that much of the way he conceives cinema—including his conception of montage—derives from his earlier experience working with melodramatic theater. ¹⁴ What thus stands out is the way Eisenstein brings feeling, associated with melodrama, into proximity with montage—a modernist innovation.

However, when considering the presence of melodramatic elements in Playing—understood as a film that is predominantly endowed with a reflexive form and therefore inherits a modernist artistic conception—there is a fundamental difference in relation to the arrangement conceived by Eisenstein between melodrama and modernist form. In Coutinho’s case, the melodramatic element is not inserted with the aim of stimulating the spectator to act upon the world. In “A Course in Treatment” (1932), ¹⁵ Eisenstein states: “The film’s job is to make the audience ‘help itself’, not to ‘entertain’ it. To grip, not to amuse. To furnish the audience with cartridges, not to dissipate the energies that it brought into the theater.” ¹⁶ In the particular case of the Brazilian film in question, its force lies, on the one hand, precisely in its power to entertain its audience, and, on the other, in its capacity to frustrate that enjoyment without thereby prompting the audience to act beyond the scope of aesthetic experience. This frustration leads viewers to attend to the film’s own melodramatic constitution, which thus presents itself as a reflexive object about cinema, theater, and literature, in keeping with the modernist aesthetic project outlined above.

At the same time, given the apparent explicitness with which, from its opening shot, Playing lays bare the resources employed in its own production—as can be found in avant-garde cinemas such as Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda (1920s) and in the Cinéma Vérité proposed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch in the 1960s ¹⁷ —one would not expect an approach that takes a “fictional system” appealing to a popular imagination as relevant to a discussion of Coutinho’s work. Even so, in this case these questions are intertwined. In Playing, melodramatic elements linked to the dimension of Brazilian popular life have their usual effects suspended over the course of the film’s development and redirected toward a perception of artistic form. To some extent, this movement—in which local issues lead to aesthetic questions that are themselves constituted by sociohistorical concerns—guides this reflection toward the dimension of the periphery of capital that traverses the questions of realism, modernism, and melodrama evoked by Playing. For this reason, let us briefly revisit discussions of peripheral modernism before proceeding with a closer reading of the film.

Readings on Peripheral Modernism

First, it is important to consider the dissensus surrounding the notion of “peripheral modernism.” In Benita Parry, ¹⁸ for example, the “peripheries and semi‑peripheries” are understood as “all societies that have been co-opted or coerced into capitalism’s world system and therefore share paradoxical experiences of transformation.” ¹⁹ However, in the Brazilian case, the idea of cooptation proves inadequate, since there was no Brazilian nation prior to capitalism. ²⁰ In order to better understand the implications of this Brazilian phenomenon, let us therefore return to the discussion undertaken by Roberto Schwarz in the essay “Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil.” ²¹ As Parry indicates, ²² in agreement with the Brazilian critic, the expression that gives the essay its title originally refers to European liberal ideas that appear displaced when implemented in nineteenth‑century Brazil, which was still organized around an archaic system of production structured on slave labor. However, it seems that Parry failed to complete Schwarz’s line of reasoning, whose argument was already present in the homonymous essay ²³ and is made explicit by the critic in a later piece entitled “Why Misplaced Ideas?” (2012). ²⁴

In this latter essay, Schwarz clarifies that “even those ideas that appear most out of place are nonetheless in place from another point of view.” ²⁵ That is, what appears displaced from the perspective of the center of capital was indeed in its proper place from the perspective of the periphery: it was precisely thanks to the liberal veneer of the Brazilian elite that slavery could be maintained, in practice, until nearly the end of the nineteenth century. From that point to the present day, what can be observed is the reassertion of the same dynamic. An example of an analysis of Brazilian culture in the mid‑twentieth century that follows this same logic can also be found in Schwarz, in the essay “Culture and Politics: 1964–1969,” ²⁶ in which the Brazilian thinker discusses cultural production grappling with the civil‑military dictatorship. Applying an analogous logic to Playing, elements linked to a popular matrix and realist appeals are not opposed to a modernist aesthetic in a peripheral context; on the contrary, it is precisely through an internal subversion of realism that modernist traits render the popular matrix resistant to the contemporary culture industry and thus enable it to remain tied to its popular grounding with its sociohistorical meaning rather than to mass culture, as would normally occur with melodrama. ²⁷

Playing, by Eduardo Coutinho: First Readings

Since Coutinho is little known outside the national territory, it is appropriate at this point to revisit some aspects of his trajectory that are relevant to understanding the film that is the object of discussion in this study. To this end, I draw on certain points presented by Brizuela and Rich ²⁸ in their introduction to one of the few publications available in English on the Brazilian director. Having begun his career during the period of Cinema Novo [New Cinema]—the Brazilian cinematic avant‑garde movement of the 1960s—Coutinho developed a singular trajectory parallel to that of the cinemanovistas. On the one hand, what united the vanguard filmmakers and Coutinho was an interest in producing a popular Brazilian cinema. On the other hand, while Cinema Novo advocated a cinema built around popular themes and figures, Brizuela and Rich ²⁹ point out that its form did not directly engage with those social groups, something Coutinho’s work consistently sought to do. It was during the same period as Cinema Novo that Coutinho began his career in film, while still affiliated with the Popular Culture Center (Centro Popular de Cultura, CPC)—an organization of the National Students’ Union (União Nacional dos Estudantes, UNE) which, during the civil‑military dictatorship, played an important role in promoting cultural initiatives aimed at an engaged art that fostered social and political awareness among the popular classes. ³⁰ It is from this period—more specifically, from 1964—that the first shoots of his most well‑known film, Man Marked to Death (Twenty Years Later). ³¹ Its production, however, was interrupted by the military and only resumed when the regime was on the verge of collapse, in 1984.

Between these two moments, Coutinho withdrew from film directing and became involved in the production of screenplays for adaptations of novels into films—works with popular and commercial appeal that nonetheless did not satisfy the director, who regarded them as artistically mediocre. ³² This second phase also includes journalistic work he carried out for Rede Globo, Brazil’s largest television network (notably famous for its soap operas, marked by melodrama). With the country’s re‑democratization, Brizuela and Rich ³³ note that Coutinho co‑founded the Center for the Creation of Popular Images (Centro de Criação de Imagem Popular, CECIP), through which he made films designed to address issues related to citizenship and the inclusion of historically excluded social groups. It is also from this period that the completion of the already mentioned Man Marked to Death. ³⁴ Finally, it was only upon joining VideoFilmes, the film production company of brothers João Moreira Salles and Walter Salles (the latter, notably, the director of Central Station ³⁵ and I’m Still Here ³⁶ —that is, a film nominated for the 1999 Academy Awards and another that won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2025, respectively), that Coutinho found the conditions to mobilize his repertoire in the service of his own aesthetic project, one more autonomous in relation to external demands than had been the case in his previous phases. A striking feature of the films made during this final period is precisely the idea of the filmmaker seeking out people based on a given thematic frame, without attempting to conceal the filming process itself. It is within this body of work that Playing appears, a film in which the director undertakes a reflection on the very dispositif employed not only in the films he produced at VideoFilmes, but also on cinematic elements used throughout his earlier production. In short, and more generally, although Coutinho’s films are not exactly productions of “high culture”—as much of Cinema Novo’s output came to be—they cannot be said to be merely commercial either, even as they seek to maintain a dialogue with broad groups of Brazilian spectators.

Focusing on Playing, released in 2007, one can say that it is among the most significant films in Brazilian cinema not only because of its prominence within Eduardo Coutinho’s body of work, ³⁷ but especially because of its internal peculiarities, which prevent it from being easily categorized as either fiction, documentary, or essay film. In this feature film, Coutinho appears, from the very outset, to make explicit—through a realist appeal—the dispositif through which the film was made (as had been customary in his previous documentary productions). In this case, as noted above, what is presented to the viewer is a newspaper advertisement seeking women willing to volunteer to share their stories. What follows is a sequence of women who step onto a theater stage to give their accounts. With the camera consistently directed at the woman, who is always positioned with her back to where a theater audience would be seated, we follow stories that, through a game of repetition and variation, unfold into a labyrinth in which, for example, three well-known Brazilian actresses—in this case, Andrea Beltrão, Fernanda Torres, and Marília Pêra, all actresses known for their work with Rede Globo—each perform the account of an unknown woman; at other times, two unknown women tell the same story; in still other sequences, famous actresses tell stories with no paired counterpart (which raises questions about the nature of the performance: are they playing another’s role, or engaging in a self–mise-en-scène?); ³⁸ and there are also unknown women who likewise have no counterpart (are they unknown actresses? Are they playing someone else’s role?). Through this process, montage delineates an aesthetic terrain for cinema, one shared with literature, staging questions central to both film studies and literary studies. Among these, the relationship between melodrama, fiction, non-fiction, reality, and artistic form stands out—an issue of particular relevance for understanding the constitutive role of social content in artistic forms originating both in the center and in the periphery of capitalism.

However, a large portion of the critical texts on the film confine themselves to a generalized discussion of fiction and non‑fiction. In the case of texts published in the press, such as those by Azevedo ³⁹ and Meneghini, ⁴⁰ and even in academically-rigorous publications like the collection organized by Milton Ohata, ⁴¹ it is common to find references to Playing as a “documentary,” a genre associated with the idea that Coutinho’s film would offer “portraits of real life,” ⁴² adopting an approach that pays “reverence to the real” ⁴³ or that undertakes a “search for truth.” ⁴⁴ From this perspective, a series of binarisms emerges and spreads across texts from both journalism and academia, such as the pairing of “real women” and “actresses,” or the “duel” between “reality” and “acting” ⁴⁵ —generating a confusion akin to that found in the film’s end credits, between the figures of the “actress” and the “character” (where one reads that “the characters were filmed in June 2006, the actresses in September” ⁴⁶ ), as if the actresses were not also characters in the film, or as if the characters were not also actresses, or, in other words, as if there were no reality in performance and vice versa.

This dispositif assembled by Coutinho, despite allowing documentary‑like portraits of the convergences and divergences in the realities of Brazilian women from different social classes, does not ultimately aim to grant this register a position of prominence, since what comes to the fore in the work is the reflexivity of its form—a point that led Ismail Xavier to state that “Coutinho’s touch is to elicit a performance that highlights what is singular in each person, rather than what they represent on the social scale and within cultural context.” ⁴⁷ That is to say, even if the social question does not appear to be foregrounded in terms of what is followed in each sequence taken in isolation, what follows here is an attempt to demonstrate how the melodramatic thread—marked by realist appeal and by its incomplete realization—runs through the accounts and points toward a social content that is present in the reflexive form of the work itself.

Notes on Melodramatic Elements in Playing

To explore this hypothesis, I begin with a close reading of the first image presented by the film immediately after the opening credits. The viewer enters a silent detail shot that remains on screen for approximately fifteen seconds, the minimum amount of time needed to discern the main elements that compose it. With minimal oscillations, the camera records an advertisement (Figure 1) that, according to what Coutinho explains in the commentary available in the DVD extras, had been published for a single day in the most widely read newspaper in Rio de Janeiro, in a magazine, and in television commercials. That is, as already indicated by the simple graphic design and the striking colors, the production opted for maximum popular appeal in publicizing the call for participants (although, as is also revealed in the extras, not all of the women unknown to the broader public came forward because of the advertisement; some of them were brought in through referrals from the production team itself).

The advertisement reads: “INVITATION—If you are a woman over 18 years old, a resident of Rio de Janeiro, have stories to tell, and wish to participate in an audition for a documentary film, contact us.” ⁴⁸ Below that text we can see the starting date for when women could get in touch with the crew, the hours of operation, the contact phone number, and, on the side, an advertising tag line: “Limited Slots.” From these initial elements alone, it is already possible to identify two force lines within the film. As an artistic object, the film takes its first steps toward assembling an intricate game traversed by socio‑historical questions—inasmuch as the advertisement simultaneously raises expectations for the audience, especially the Brazilian audience, and partially frustrates them; as a commodity, beginning the film with the advertisement directs the viewer’s attention to a popular universe marked by a diffuse mirroring, through mass culture, of symbols of modernity—an imaginary that dates back to the relationship among women, cinema, modernity, commodity, and popular culture already in the 1920s, whether in Rio de Janeiro ⁴⁹ or in major capitalist centers such as Germany, as described by Hansen when referring to an Americanism ⁵⁰ in vogue at that time. ⁵¹ Returning to the close‑up shot in Playing, at the margins of the main advertisement two other ads are partially visible—one for an aesthetic clinic located in downtown Rio de Janeiro and another for a weekly magazine. This is the metaphorical image of the universe that surrounds the film: that of everyday popular life caught between commercial appeals—such as the production of bodies that conform to market‑dictated aesthetic standards—and entertainment, as exemplified by the lateral appearance of a weekly magazine, a publication typically oriented toward amusement and toward publicizing celebrity intimacy.

It is worth emphasizing, however, that these associations are not overtly foregrounded. In its intentionality, the production turns to individual life trajectories that gradually unfold into a reflection on cinema itself. In other words, these associations are present primarily as a function of the social ground on which the feature film is produced. In this respect, it is important to recall that Playing was produced and released between the first and second terms of President Lula’s government, a period recognized for modest social improvements that, despite being the result of public policies, were felt as stemming solely from the individual effort of citizens—or, as historian Perry Anderson ⁵² has summarized it, a period marked by popular demobilization and consumerism. ⁵³ It does not seem coincidental that Brazilian films of the period so frequently explored the device of personal testimony, as had already been mentioned earlier through reference to the study by Lins and Mesquita. ⁵⁴

Once again returning to the opening detail shot of Playing, the “invitation” addressed to women over the age of 18, residents of Rio de Janeiro, who wish to share stories in an audition for a documentary film appears in a central position. It is thus that, already in its opening moments, the film lays out its principal components, both in terms of its composition and of the relationship it seeks to establish with its audience. From the invitation, one can infer a proposal that is at once generic, intriguing, and seductive, resonating with the popular cult of television and film celebrities; ⁵⁵ from the reference to women over 18 living in Rio de Janeiro, an imaginary is mobilized that circulates around what might be called “female protagonism” (traversed by issues of women making themselves heard, by the deployment of a discourse that casts the Carioca woman (that is, the woman from Rio de Janeiro) as representative of Brazilian womanhood, and by the idea that public self‑exposure on television amounts to an index of integration into a higher social class); from the sharing of stories, curiosity, and popular appeal ⁵⁶ —already present in the notion of an invitation—are reactivated and, in keeping with a certain imaginary that associates the feminine with melodrama. It should also be noted that, while the advertisement is generic in referring to “stories,” the film’s development shows participants always sharing personal stories; that is, if “sharing stories” mobilizes a meaning oriented toward the collective, its realization in the feature film takes on a sense tied to self‑promotion. Finally, from the audition for a documentary film, one can observe the presence of an artifice (perhaps more proper to fiction films) in the making of a non‑fictional work. If there is an audition, there is a process of selection; in other words, there is no mere recording of things “as they are,” as common sense would have it with regard to documentary cinema. Moreover, in line with the intriguing nature of the advertisement, doubt is cast over what is to come in the feature film: what will be offered? Is it the documentary film resulting from this audition, or is the film itself precisely the audition, understood even as an experiment, as something uncertain and unfinished? This doubt is instituted through the tension between what manifests itself concretely in the work and what is evoked by it in accordance with a more commercial cinematic tradition. Within this set of productions, narrative continuity is typically sought as the predominant mode of editing, ⁵⁷ legitimized as a resource of veracity and as reinforcement of image realism in its transparency—something that Playing only partially enacts.

After the announcement, the viewer begins to follow the thirteen sequences of Coutinho’s encounters with the female subjects. Over the course of these sequences, we accompany a variety of women, whose narrative vignettes of life lived in early-twenty-first-century Rio are summarized in the following table (Table 1). Within this tangle of narratives, the spectator’s attention is drawn to the indistinguishability between fiction and non‑fiction. The accounts are placed on an equal footing, marked simultaneously by their market‑oriented character (apparently transparent, offering enjoyment through the audience’s identification with the participants’ experiences) and by their artistic character (opaque, therefore, as the audience is continually frustrated in its search for external referentiality in the audiovisual images). The latter is productive of a sense of estrangement, which is caused by the breaking of expectations regarding who is narrating: is it a character, or a character‑actress?

Curiously, this paradox seems to share a common denominator in the exploration of different aspects involved in the construction of the feature film’s melodramatic tenor. The filmic image itself does not vary greatly across Coutinho’s encounter sequences with the participants, but the expressivity of the narrative images is evoked by the spoken word. The critical reception of Playing has referred to this verbal‑corporeal dimension, which is encompassed by the filmic dimension when taking into account mise‑en‑scène and montage. ⁵⁸ The women are consistently recorded in shots ranging from medium shots to close‑ups, framed with the camera at a normal angle, three‑quarters to the right. The constant lighting highlights the female figures while also casting a faint illumination on the background, where theater seats can be seen, allowing the viewer to infer that the protagonists are positioned on a stage (Figure 2). In addition, the film’s critical reception itself makes reference to the attention paid to the “birth of the word,” ⁵⁹ a view likewise endorsed by Coutinho himself ⁶⁰ —and one that can, indeed, be identified in the feature film.

The consistency of the filmic image and variance in spoken word links Playing to studies on melodrama, namely, three characteristics that are generally identified as central to melodrama. These are anticipation, heightened symbolization, and obviousness. ⁶¹ As observed in this study, these characteristics ultimately contribute to an equivalence between fiction and non‑fiction. More directly put, melodramatic filmic narrative is one in which elements are offered to the spectator so that they know the outcome of the characters before the characters themselves do. Expectations are confirmed through an appeal to realist effect. This is precisely what we see at work in the imaginary of the participants (and perhaps especially of the Brazilian audience as Coutinho conceives them). Numerous examples could be cited, but three specific sequences in the film can serve as illustration.

With respect to anticipation, we can highlight Gisele, who, as a “spiritualist,” claims to be “attentive to signs” and who, in a dream, agrees to help a spirit despite experiencing a “pain in her chest,” ⁶² which later proves to be a bad omen preceding the accidental childbirth that leads to her son’s death. Regarding heightened symbolization, the actress Marília Pêra, despite the restraint of her performance, later tells Coutinho that she nearly burst into tears when recalling the “little face [of her own] little daughter” ⁶³ while playing the role of Sarita, in which she recounted a mother’s experience of estrangement from her daughter. As for obviousness, we can also refer to Sarita’s case. In her second sequence, we have one of the high points of melodrama in Playing, for it is here when she chooses to sing a traditional children’s song, widely known among Brazilians, which had been used by her grandmother, her mother, and her father to lull her to sleep as a child. This, she tells us, was the same song she herself, as an adult, sang to lull her own daughter to sleep. Sarita seeks symbolically to reestablish familial bonds so that her participation in the film would not be, as she herself says, “too sad.”

In all of these cases, it is important to consider those melodramatic characteristics often appear simultaneously in Coutinho’s film. Suffering commonly unfolds through anticipation alongside the verbal creation of excessive and explicit images. Moreover, as noted in typical characterizations of the melodramatic genre, flashback is “almost the narrative itself, and present time [is] a pretext or justification for narrating the action.” ⁶⁴ That description closely resembles what Playing becomes through the dispositif created by Coutinho, since the main reason the participants take the stage is precisely to share some story publicly (which, as Coutinho comments in the DVD extras, always turned out to be personal in nature). Thus, despite uncertainties regarding enunciation (which might otherwise produce distance between the audience and the work), the stories would still harbor within themselves a “discourse about reality,” ⁶⁵ consisting of an affective immersion in the private lives of Brazilian women from different social classes. Indeed, within the melodramatic imaginary, the plausible is what provokes affects, expressed in laughter and tears. In this way, melodrama is established through a “pact of intimacy” ⁶⁶ with its spectators, in which it is only private life (one’s own) that is felt as real. This same imaginary, on the other hand, associates public life with theater, within a tradition in which theater is understood as synonymous with falsity.

In the case of Playing, one cannot fail to recall the constant presence of the red theater seats in the background of the image, continuously reminding the spectator—by means of a filmic procedure—that the stories being shared take place on a theater stage which, once incorporated into the film, casts doubt on the referentiality of the audiovisual images. Thus, a tension is established between the supposed falsity of theater and the supposed truth of “documentary film,” which is how the newspaper ad in the opening shot characterized this work of cinema. In this way, Coutinho arrives at a kind of synthesis in which one cannot say that there is nothing true on the filmic stage. Some truth endures, but not in its transparent form.

In all the sequences, the female figures of Playing are protagonists of stories that retain features of the plots typical of classical Hollywood melodramatic films. From a psychoanalytically influenced perspective, ⁶⁷ such films bring the female figure to the foreground through a characterization defined by the lack of supposedly masculine qualities (such as courage, leadership, and autonomy—representing, psychoanalytically, the “threat of castration”) and by the assumption of the role of the object of male desire. That is, although the female figure appears to occupy the center of Hollywood melodramatic plots, relegating the man to the margins, what is continuously reaffirmed is the strong presence of the masculine.

With Playing, however, a displacement occurs. The figure of the man is markedly weak within the stories. ⁶⁸ In general, the men admired by the protagonists are dead, and the others are either relegated to the background or rendered negligible for the narrators. Nevertheless, this diminished presence does not allow us to claim that women are, in fact, at the center of the narratives. What emerges instead is a kind of weak or absent masculine core around which the narratives nonetheless revolve. This hypothesis is reinforced by the mise‑en‑scène itself: the female characters are frequently framed in close‑ups, illuminated and highlighted, while the background at times appears filled with empty audience seats and at other times is completely unlit, plunged into darkness; meanwhile, Coutinho—the only male figure—is briefly captured in profil perdu (Figure 3). The camera’s focus remains fixed on the female character, yet her speech and bodily expressions are always responses to a stimulus provided by the male interlocutor, who is predominantly invisible. A paradigmatic case is the entrance of actress Fernanda Torres in the role of Aleta. In his experimental impulse, Coutinho decides to greet the character addressing Fernanda directly, which breaks the fictional convention of the scene and precipitates a performative crisis, transforming the sequence not simply into an instance of acting, but into the actress’s very process of constructing the character.

At this point, once again, it is possible to recall an observation made earlier, in a footnote, regarding Bette Davis, ⁶⁹ the Hollywood actress who became famous primarily for melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s. A brief review of these films seems to indicate a departure from the Hollywood norm, since, in many of the films starring Davis, the male characters are also marked as a weak presence, albeit a central one. Even so, a specifically Brazilian dimension remains: the mobilization of a popular imaginary that reaches back to the very formation of the Brazilian nation and that is periodically revisited allegorically, whether through film or through other artistic manifestations.

In critical discussions of a Brazilian film with a markedly melodramatic character— i.e., Central Station ⁷⁰ — scholars have noted the alignment of its plot with a Latin American melodramatic tradition in which the absent paternal figure functions as a narrative engine. ⁷¹ The same can be observed in another film by Walter Salles, cofounder of the production company behind Playing. I am referring to I’m Still Here. ⁷² If, in the first case, the search for the paternal figure is associated with an allegorical search for a national project, in the second, it is linked to the pursuit of democracy, justice, and historical reparation. ⁷³ These films must be read within the broader context of national cultural production. This dynamic, for example, also reverberates in other artistic forms, such as in the lyrics of the song “Língua” [Language] by Caetano Veloso (1984): “My language is my fatherland / And I have no fatherland, I have a motherland / And I want a brotherhood.” ⁷⁴ This is an allusion to a statement made in the early twentieth century by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who declared: “My fatherland is the Portuguese language.” ⁷⁵ While Portuguese colonizers harbored no doubt about the constitution of their homeland, for Brazilians, what remains is a kind of void—figured in paternal absence and in associated values such as order and leadership. Even so, one cannot deny the existence of a shared sense of origin, of connection to the same “gentle mother,” which does not prevent Brazilians from aspiring to fraternity, to a utopia of a just and inclusive society. This is to say what has been traced thus far, which is to establish that the manner in which melodramatic elements are arranged in Playing mobilize socio‑historically constructed meanings in such a way that the realist effect blurs the boundaries between the fictional and the non‑fictional. This perception, however, is only made possible by a kind of modernist framing that permeates the filmic form of Coutinho’s work.

Situating Melodramatic Elements within a Modernist Framework

Given the identification of elements that make up a melodramatic fictional system—the emphasis on the spoken word; the valorization of the interviewees’ life trajectories (whether through the brief elevation to fame of previously unknown participants or through the stripping away of the veneer of stardom from well‑known actresses); the pursuit of a connection between the affective worlds of the interviewees and those of the spectators through anticipation, heightened symbolization, and obviousness; the elevation of women to protagonism, as discussed in the analysis of the newspaper ad above—a question emerges: would it be accurate to say that Playing is simply one more Latin American melodrama? Once we consider the editing and the minimalist composition of the shots, the answer is clearly no. While the verbal‑corporeal dimension bears proximity to melodrama, its incomplete realization leads the spectator to attend to the very constitution of the filmic dimension that encompasses it, thus revealing a closer affinity with aspects of a modernist aesthetic.

While melodrama plays on the impossibility of separating the fiction constitutive of the participants’ narratives from reality (which would seem to include the experiences of the audience ⁷⁶ ), it is worth emphasizing that the question posed by the film is not that of fiction versus reality, but rather of fiction versus non‑fiction—that is, between socio‑historically constituted perceptions articulated through narrative, regardless of whether or not they refer directly to reality. The referential blurring produced by the film, however, pushes the question further: it is no longer a matter of what is being referred to, but instead of how reference itself is constructed.

For this reason, among the scholars who have addressed Playing, there are those who argue the film comes closer to the essay form. Among them, Ilana Feldman stands out in asserting that in the essay film “. . . the relationship among word, image, and referent ceases to be immediate; there is always a hesitation between the search for certainties and the impossibility of fixing them, between the will to truth and all the impossibilities of language.” ⁷⁷ What imposes itself, then, is the enigma. According to Adorno, “. . . artworks are enigmatic in terms not of their composition, but of their truth content.” ⁷⁸ Indeed, in the case of Playing, while its composition is intelligible, its truth content resists determination, since no meaning is pointed outside the film itself, bringing the work closer to philosophy. For Ismail Xavier, with Playing Coutinho foregrounds “the idea of film as thinking in action,” ⁷⁹ referring back to Adorno’s definition of the essay as a “form that thinks.” ⁸⁰ Along similar lines, it is also possible to draw the film closer to literature. To use Adorno’s expression in “Transparencies on Film,” ⁸¹ Coutinho achieves, through montage, the composition of “a constellation akin to that of writing.” ⁸² Consequently, the appeal to literalness—typical of mass communication media (and thus associated with the production of melodramas and a certain audiovisual writing)—fades as the spectator is continually placed in tension between the emotion evoked by the accounts (characterized by a romanticized reverberation constituted by the culture industry) and the reflection on the filmic form itself, produced by the audiovisual resources that make up the feature.

Thus, Playing gives rise to an opaque mode of writing. This approach raises the hypothesis that this is a way of identifying the artistic character of Coutinho’s film which, to recall Nicholas Brown’s point, ⁸³ is suspended from the circuit of mere consumption and, in its autonomy, is opened up to interpretation. This autonomy, however, is not immediately offered by the film in its transparency. It is necessary to approach the work in its opacity, which means considering dialectically the way in which its editing is constructed. This same notion is affirmed in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “Artworks . . . that negate meaning must also necessarily be disrupted in their unity; this is the function of montage, which disavows unity through the emerging disparateness of the parts at the same time that, as a principle of form, it reaffirms unity.” ⁸⁴

In Playing, two examples illustrate Coutinho’s concern with the positioning of certain sequences between fragmentation and the formation of a unity. First, I mention the case of the film’s first female subject, that of Mary Sheyla, the character who presents herself as an actress thanks to the support she received from a non‑governmental organization. Later, in the seventh sequence, we follow the account of Jeckie Brown, the Carioca rapper. ⁸⁵ How can we understand the viewer’s surprise when Jeckie de-claims one of her raps in which she spoke about herself and, in so doing, repeats and claims as her own biographical details we had already heard from Mary’s lips in her opening sequence? Was this a mere coincidence, given the characters’ shared social origins? Or, should this repetition be read in light of the experiments staged in the film, in which one of them might be performing the role of the other?

Another case appears in the sixth sequence, in which we follow the story of a woman ⁸⁶ whose son is murdered during a robbery. The fact that the woman is unknown to the general public does not initially open up the possibility of her being an actress. ⁸⁷ However, as the film approaches its conclusion, in the twelfth sequence, another woman begins her account, ⁸⁸ which develops essentially as a transcription of the story heard in the sixth sequence. Such games led Jean‑Claude Bernardet to argue that the film promotes an “autonomization of narratives,” ⁸⁹ both in themselves and in relation to one another. In the film, Bernardet argues, “discourse speaks to itself,” separated from the “speaking bodies,” since “somewhere in the middle of the film or a bit later, a woman tells her story, but I have already heard that story told a few minutes earlier—who was it that told it again?” ⁹⁰ In other words, Bernardet situates an intrinsic tension of the film within the dimension inhabited, as he himself puts it, by “speaking bodies”—that is, the verbal‑corporeal dimension. Yet this dimension only exists because there is a filmic dimension which, through montage and shot composition, removes the accounts from their individuality and brings to the fore the socio‑historical background that reverberates throughout the film’s development. The dissociation between body and word alluded to in Bernardet’s reading (2013) thus acquires a new meaning: that of their inseparability and uniqueness at each appearance.

As Adorno states in his lectures on aesthetics, ⁹¹ taking up a dichotomy developed by Benjamin, engaging with modern works of art means establishing a tense relationship with artistic objects, for they are characterized by two poles: play and semblance. As play, the gaze turns toward the internal constitution of the work, “not viewed as directly real but placed in parentheses;” ⁹² as semblance, the gaze turns toward its being‑in‑the‑world as opacity—it “has an intention, . . . it means something, . . . something appears in it which is more than the mere appearance itself.” ⁹³ To read a work, therefore, does not involve simply letting oneself be carried away by it, nor bending it to one’s own purposes, but rather locating a point that allows for an assumption of responsibility in the attribution of meaning between play and semblance. This responsibility ultimately entails a kind of mimesis—not one grounded in transparency, in which the work represents the external world, but another in which the reader’s words must seek a translation for what constitutes artistic form. To consider, as this study proposes, Playing’s filmic dimension as encompassing its verbal‑corporeal one is a way of qualifying the modernist framing of melodrama through a reversal whereby, instead of leading the spectator toward the commodity, the film leads them toward artistic form.

Final Considerations: Melodrama in Playing and Brazilian Peripheral Modernism

By way of conclusion, I would like to briefly retrace the trajectory of this study, which began with partial definitions of realism and modernism—sufficient, however, to situate the peculiarity of cinema, as an art form, within aesthetic debate. This contextualization aimed to frame a discussion of Playing, a singular film within Brazilian cinematography. As has been shown, its critical reception has largely relegated to the margins an aspect that runs throughout the film: the absorption of melodramatic elements. Nevertheless, in making this observation, I do not argue that the film is a melodrama. On the contrary, what emerges is the reflexive nature of the feature, which asserts itself precisely through the incomplete realization of melodramatic effects, even as it mobilizes a popular imaginary. For this very reason—which situates the work within a peripheral context—the reflexivity of modernist origin also does not materialize in the same way it commonly does in European and North American works; this does not signal a separation of Brazilian production from the central modernist movement, but rather a dialectical articulation with it.

It is through its indirect linkage to reality that the filmic form of Playing becomes capable of anticipating developments at the center of capitalism, such as the movement that led, in 2016—almost ten years after the film’s release—to the inclusion of the term “post‑truth” in the Oxford Dictionaries. ⁹⁴ Through this lens of refuge in what is taken as real today, melodrama—when we consider the filmic dimension—comes to be relativized by the explicit exposure of a mechanism that makes apparent the growing contemporary perception that language is seen as the starting point of truth. Playing thus makes explicit, in its opacity, a movement intrinsic to melodrama as transparency, whose effect is to blur the boundaries between the fictional and the non‑fictional. Gledhill makes a statement of particular relevance to the purposes of this argument: “While the drive of realism is to possess the world by understanding it, and the modern and post-modern explore in different ways the consequences of this ambition’s disillusion, the central drive of melodrama is to force meaning and identity from the inadequacies of language . . . In the face of the limitations of realism exposed by post-structuralism, it [melodrama] operates on the level not so much of ‘Yes, but...,’ than of ‘So what?’” ⁹⁵

It seems to be precisely from this “so what?” that the audience’s affections emerge, beyond all the estrangements introduced by Coutinho. Moreover, to inquire into these estrangements is to think about the functioning of this very “so what?” The form of Playing ultimately exposes a mode of reading that applies both to cinematic and literary works, since in both cases the relationship between spectator or reader and the work establishes an ambiguous dynamic between personal identification through apparent transparency and the reverberation of a social truth content that resides in the work’s opacity. Herein lies Coutinho’s achievement amid a generation of Brazilian documentary films of the 2000s in which the reality effect derives from identification with a melodramatic imaginary shared around private life. ⁹⁶ This is a discourse with sociopolitical implications that nonetheless claims to display an inaugural contact with objective reality, thereby producing the prerogative of truth. By universalizing itself as truth, it denies itself as a mere subjective projection of reality.

What has been done here, therefore, is a trajectory that, starting from elements of the film’s verbal-corporal dimension, pointed to a possible popular matrix through which the film is marked by its melodramatic tone, exploring sociocultural and historical traits of the relationship between male and female genders in Brazil. However, this verbal-corporeal dimension only exists by virtue of another—the filmic one—which is characterized by the reflexivity of language in a modernist key. This form, ultimately, not only proves authentic by synthesizing issues specific to the periphery but, by inserting itself into the world system, also shares and anticipates aesthetic and social questions concerning the center of capitalism.