They Don't Wear Black Tie

Brazil’s military dictatorship, in place since 1964, had entered a period of liberalization when Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and director Leon Hirszman adapted the former’s 1958 play, Eles Não Usam Black-Tie, in response to industrial strikes occurring in São Paulo, to where they reset the play’s action (from Rio de Janeiro). Both Guarnieri, who also assumed the principal role of union leader Otávio, and Hirszman, whose Polish parents eluded the Holocaust by moving to Brazil, are Marxists committed to workers’ rights and social progress.

At the center of the film are a father and son. Both work in the same metalworking factory that also employs the boy’s pregnant girlfriend, Maria. But while Otávio helps organize the strike at work, Tião opts for a more immediate, practical future, one that entails providing for Maria, whom he wishes to marry as soon as possible, and their baby. In the service of this priority, he becomes a scab, deepening the divide between himself and his father, which his mother, Romana (Fernanda Montenegro—Oscar-nominated for Walter Salles’s 1998 Central Station, but here giving a much more complex and valuable performance), painfully does her best to moderate. Ironically, Tião’s stance also damages his relationship with Maria, who is more in tune with Otávio’s activism. —Dennis Grunes