Water never lies

In Canoas, by Tamar Guimarães, the swimming pool is the centre of the fun. The pool shifts, depending on the time of day. We see the daytime pool, where the lady of the house bathes, losing track of time while her servants, in black and white uniforms, tire themselves out with their tasks. The owner is lost in her thoughts, gazing at the sun. She doesn’t notice the workers, nor they her.

Bored, she gets up. She shifts about, remembers something, goes indoors, calls someone. She’s invisible to the servants, who talk about her with gritted teeth as they clean the house. And they are invisible to her, as she walks about unseen, as if this were a convention of blind people.

It is this double blindness that shapes Canoas, even when day becomes night, and the party prepared by the servants during the afternoon finally gets underway. The lady of the house’s only responsibility has been to wash, dress, put on her make-up and get into the hosting spirit.

If for her leisure is everything, for the servants it is an unknown. The pool, which fills the screen, is delimited by the workers’ footsteps, and occasionally by hers, whenever she gets up to go inside, languidly provoked by tedium.

But none of them see each other, in this dance between opposites. Some appear only for her to disappear, opposites on the water’s surface, which, instead of showing their reflections, shows only each party’s blindness.

They walk here and there, like sprites, in a dance that follows the guests’ footsteps, collecting the glasses they put down everywhere, anticipating their needs, clearing up in their wake.

The guests discuss art and Brazil’s eternal state of crisis, artists and the state of the world. Their tone is theatrical and detached. One could say that their world expresses their anxieties regarding the social class to which those same workers — who collect their cups and offer them canapés — belong. A contrast arises between speech and gesture, or between speech and practice. What they say is not reflected in how they act. Alienated from others, the party guests are professionals of the other, they dance and drink, blind and deaf to the servants, who must efface themselves and fulfil their obligations.

While the pool forms the frame for this party, it also indicates that, in Canoas, inequality is a game of mirrors. At night, the pool is black, reflecting only the lights and the rustling dresses. Yet, it is exactly as if before a black mirror that the conversations in Canoas take place, as some take drugs and drink cocktails as if they were caught in eternity, suspended in time, while others tire themselves out, battered by the hours they must work.

Fatigue, as an effect of effort and labour, is a projection of inequality. The servants’ day began early in the morning and will only end the next morning. The guests’ day, free of work, is beyond fatigue: when they do finally get tired, it’s because they’ve been having fun.

The least fertile element of Canoas might be the conversations between the party guests, which, trying as they do to reveal how the guests view the servants’ world as mere faits divers, transactional, end up saying more than they show. While it is through these conversations that the differences are confirmed, we may see more clearly what Tamar Guimarães wants to show us if we focus on the dancing, the silence in the half-light, the house’s wooden interiors, the gleaming dresses that contrast with the silent gestures and expressions of the workers.

The pool is both a silent witness and an echo chamber, because the water never speaks, but also never lies. The wealthy bathe. The poor clean up their rubbish — without the two ever communicating or seeing each other.

The morning comes, the servants go home, take off their uniforms. The bosses sleep. Everyone is absent, as if they have said goodbye after an meeting, which in fact never took place, since they don’t know each other, never saw each other, never noticed each other, despite being subject to reciprocal conversation, like the white spaces on a page full of text.

The strange governess

Val (Regina Casé), the woman at the centre of Que Horas Ela Volta?, has family nearby and family far away. She spends her days in her employers’ home, where she is the mother of the house. It is she who teaches the youngest to swim and gives romantic advice to the oldest. She who listens to their secrets, soothes and consoles them, and serves them all selflessly. One would say she likes what she does, and appears, at least, to hold great affection for these substitute children. The youngest, referring to his actual mother, asks his make-believe mother “What time will she come home?”, and the mother of the house, embracing him, replies that she has no idea.

This scenario seems familiar to us in fiction because it is familiar from the inequality of life in many cities. Mothers who wake up early (if they don’t live in their bosses’ houses) and leave their own children at home, heading to the houses where they work, to spend their days as mothers to the children of other women, whose orders they receive. The day-to-day of this mother, as imagined by Anna Muylaert, does allow for redemptory moments, such as when she tries her employer’s cosmetics, or sunbathes during a break, or even when she lovingly cuddles her adoptive children. But she is a mother far away from her own, who she calls occasionally, telling them she loves them.

What matters is what these women are made of, and what their children will be made of, as they grow up lending their mothers to rich children, while they themselves unravel alone at home until their mothers return, as night falls: or perhaps never even see them, because their mother sleeps at the workplace. They are common mothers, mothers like anyone, and yet motherhood and love are here functions of the value of labour and the geometry of capitalism, which puts them in the position of selling their time in exchange for the loss of their children’s childhood — time lost and irretrievable, which they may regret for the rest of their lives.

What is there to say, in turn, about the absent mother, the one who has no time to come home, the boss whose child asks after her? This is not a duel among two invisible parties, because the mother of this house is visible, as is the employer, in the orders that must be followed throughout the day.

The arrival to the bosses’ house of Val’s daughter, who must sit an exam, causes a redemptive rebalancing of their positions and lays bare the mother’s condition, as she, until now, has been on loan to the employers’ children. Perhaps Jess (Camila Márdila) and her successes matter in the extent to which they represent a squaring of accounts. Yet however auspicious they are, they cannot fully compensate for the poetic situation the two are in: how foreign the daughter finds her mother’s life, and how both of them are, in the end, outsiders admitted into a setting that silences them. What else does Que Horas Ela Volta? tell us about Val, and women like Val, but that the trading of their affections comes at the cost of never really belonging, of being, at the same time, a governess and an outsider, a guest and yet treated with hostility, in the houses they live in? It is difficult to say where the homes of women like Val are, since they no longer belong to the homes they have left behind, but also do not belong to the homes where they work.

They are homeless mothers, borrowed consolations, figures of longing, placeless people, charged with governing in spaces that will never be theirs, treating as their own other people’s children, who will remain indifferent to the love that women like Val develop for them. And, ultimately, they are alone in their condition, because not even their own children know them, even as they may already be mothers themselves.

And so Val’s brief moments, in the sun, in a break between tasks, take on their own importance, because in those intervals Val is simply herself, separate from either of her roles as mother. Could this film exist if Val was a woman without children? The dynamic in Que Horas Ela Volta? depends on the pendulum swinging between belongings and a concomitantly varying swing of emotions. Who does Val belong to? Who is in charge: Jéssica, her employers, their children — who will claim her? Perhaps a person belongs, before all else, to themselves, and only the value of that proposition remains non-negotiable, as Anna Muylaert reminds us with grace and acuity.