Duas Vezes com Helena

São Paulo, 1938: Polydoro (Fábio Assunção) is the favorite pupil of bachelor lyceum teacher Alberto (Carlos Gregório) and they become close friends. After a brief stay to study in Paris, Polydoro returns to Brazil on the outbreak of WWII. Out of work and with no immediate plans, he gladly accepts the invitation of now married Alberto to spend some days with him and his wife Helena at the couple's small country house. But when Polydoro gets there, he learns that Alberto has been delayed; Polydoro finds himself alone with and terribly attracted to the beautiful and strangely remote wife of his mentor. This is just the beginning of a story of false appearances, calculated deceit, ambiguous motivations and tragic selfishness leading to terrible consequences in the lives of the three protagonists.

"Duas Vezes com Helena", Mauro Farias' second feature film (9 years after his award-winning but ill-fated "Não Quero Falar sobre Isso Agora") is based on the novella by Brazil's legendary film historian, critic, intellectual and political activist Paulo Emílio Sales Gomes, who only very late in his life tried his hand at fiction, writing three novellas published in 1977. In "Duas Vezes..." (also adapted, much more freely, by Paulo César Saraceni in his 1981 film "Ao Sul do Meu Corpo"), Paulo Emílio takes the convoluted plot twists of Gothic and Romantic literature and treats them with dry, witty, ironic style, though it's true his fiction work can't be seriously compared with his highly influential, brilliant essays and articles on Brazilian and Third World cinema.

There's a lot of Stefan Zweig's influence in Paulo Emílio's story and Farias' film. The intense mentor-pupil relationship in "Duas Vezes..." recalls Zweig's study of consuming devotion and closeted homosexuality in "Verwirrung der Gefühle" (though Zweig was more explicit). The characters in "Duas Vezes" also have their lives dramatically changed forever because of a soul-consuming fixation, like in "24 Hours of a Woman's Life" and "Letter from an Unknown Woman", and their actions have ominous consequences they cannot control -- obsession, self-torment, deceit and guilt are keywords in common.

Incidentally, Max Ophüls's classic 1948 film version of Zweig's "Letter..." seems to be a major influence here, in the way Farias interweaves past and present and shows us how a "love story" can mean completely different things to each of the "lovers". Furthermore, Farias' use of deliberately artificial-looking back-projection scenery (mostly archive footage from São Paulo in the 1940s and in the 1970s, Paris in the 1930s etc) may have been born out of financial constraints, but they have the anti-realist, romantic effect of the "magic trip carriage" backdrop sequence in Ophüls film where Louis Jourdan seduces Joan Fontaine.

Melanie Dimantas' screenplay is too reverential to the original text: ALL the dialog is taken verbatim from the novella, and often seems it doesn't belong in mouths but in printed paper. Director Farias abandons his interesting visual ideas midway; after a promising start with the artificial back projections, the film's visual conception becomes progressively conservative. As a filmmaker, Farias sort of stays in the shadow: he's a subtle director trying to handle a convoluted, delirious story that perhaps asked for a flamboyant, surrealistic stylist to be really effective. While it's true that Alberto and Helena are characters so insanely Macchiavellian they could have become ridiculous or camp (and they don't), Farias renders them so frigid we can't believe they have the emotions that overpower them.

The film has major drawbacks, like the bad make-up conception and execution (Alberto is the only character who really ages), the washed-out colors that makes the film look rather cold, Fábio Assunção's very unsatisfactory performance as Polydoro (he's not convincing as a bright young student, neither as a disillusioned middle-aged man), and Farias's faltering rhythm gives us time to see the holes in the script (and in the original story). But it also has definite assets, like Christine Fernandes' beauty as Helena (she looks like a classier Sharon Stone), Carlos Gregório's engaging composition of Alberto, the very efficient music and the nice idea of the back projection sets. Worth a look, especially if you're curious to discover the fictional side of Paulo Emílio's oeuvre.