In the tradition of Day for Night, Brazilian director Guto Parente’s new film Death and Life Madalena follows the production of a film beginning to end with ebullient humor. As in François Truffaut’s classic, constantly occurring obstacles keep the film-within-a-film always in a precarious position, yet the cast and crew’s earnest commitment to the shared project always keep it alive for another day. Parente’s film has its own distinctive artistic identity, though, and the film he crafts is as much a love letter to scrappy low-budget cinema as it is a celebration of artists whose identities and lifestyles place them on society’s margins. Anchored by a tremendous leading performance by Noá Bonoba as the titular protagonist, Death and Life Madalena is a warm-hearted, cinephilic comedy centering the messy and idiosyncratic joys of artistic collaboration.
Madalena, called Mada by her friends, sets out to produce her filmmaker father’s final script, a sci-fi B-movie, soon after his death, working on a shoestring budget while she is eight months pregnant. Her partner, Davi (Marcus Curvelo), is set to direct, but after he abandons the production, Mada recruits eccentric actor Oswaldo (Tavinho Teixeira), a close friend of her father’s, to take his place — only after two of her more trusted collaborators turn down the opportunity. In between medical check-ups, Mada struggles to get the money meant to pay her cast and crew released from the bank, and has even greater difficulty managing Oswaldo, whose scattered, bacchanalian directorial style is unproductive at best: Mada’s assistant director and close friend, Natasha (Nataly Rocha), shows her a video of Oswaldo stripping atop a speaker during what were supposed to be shooting hours, leading to a confrontation where Mada utters the indelible line “Kubrick would never stick his arm up his ass on top of a sound system, Oswaldo!”
Grieving the loss of her father and preparing to usher new life into the world, Mada is at an inflection point, and her reflections on her life provide a subtler counterpoint to the production’s pandemonium. Utilizing several cinematic devices, including simple conversations and phone calls to loved ones, but also fully staged flashbacks and a surprising and well-crafted animated sequence, Parente provides glimpses into Mada’s past. After the death of her mother in a car crash, she spent much of her childhood on film sets with her father, which sparked her imagination and provided a safe and convivial environment, even after traumatic episodes. Now, pregnant with a child that we learn early on is not Davi’s, Mada’s commitment to the completion of her father’s film is not only an act of commemoration, but an expression of deeply held love for her father and her passion for the process of filmmaking.
Bonoba excels in all aspects of the layered character she plays. When working, Mada tries to maintain a veneer of calm that gets broken down incrementally with each new obstacle, and Bonoba performs the rage and frustration that inevitably burst forth with full-bodied energy and precise comic timing. She is equally adept when called on to portray quieter moments of grief, intimacy, and tenderness, communicating a vivid interior life and emotional complexity through subtle facial and vocal modulations. Bonoba’s performance is at once dynamic and disciplined, grounding the film in a compelling emotional reality and allowing actors in more broadly comedic secondary roles to go big and bold — particularly Teixeira, whose Oswaldo is a mostly endearing, occasionally frightening chaos agent.
The cast of characters, like the film’s actual cast, includes many queer people. Parente has remarked that “queer cinema is a cinema that inspires freedom, that seeks to displace borders, to tear down moral walls, and my interest in it is both aesthetic and political.” The collective effort by a sexually- and gender-diverse crew to craft a low-budget, campy sci-fi movie is a delight to witness, both in the comic situations that arise and in the very “freedom” Parente portrays in this fictional production. The mode of collaboration on display in Death and Life Madalena is not one without power structures, conflicts, and poor behavior — Parente is not staging a utopia, and in fact portrays several ethically troubling moments on set — but it does include close collaboration, malleability in the roles played by individuals, and a collective sense of care. The politics of this dynamic, like the film’s queerness, are not explicitly pointed out but are ever-present, providing a vision of the kind of aesthetic, moral, and communal freedom Parente seeks to inspire. What is ultimately most moving and joyful about Death and Life Madalena is that, at least in the emotionally and artistically vibrant world Parente cultivates, the love of cinema and the love of one’s community are one and the same.
Published as part of FIDMarseille 2025 — Dispatch 2.
Comments are closed.