Kritiken

m its very first frame, Aïnouz’s vibrant and warm-hued ["Invisible Life"] envelops you within its tropical world of saturated colors and extreme sensations, to then gradually ascend to a heartrending finale, honoring the sisterly bond at its center with an openhanded serving of tears.

"Invisible Life" is a profound example of the insidious and continuing effects of tyranny against women. But that said, the film is so alive, so joyous and raucous at times, that the empathy you feel for these characters is all the more poignant and the catharsis is well earned. This is a film you fall into, like an embrace you wish two sisters would hold, but one that the world denies them.

[The film is] measured-to-the-point-of-monotony (but ultimately deeply moving).

[Ainouz] proves himself less interested in narrative mechanics and causal logic than in the use of affect as an integral mode of perception, and its translation into expressionistic, emotionally charged, sometimes shocking images.

Aïnouz’s “Invisible Life” reflects the kind of love story we rarely see on-screen, and it’s a gem worth discovering for yourself.

Gorgeous... ["Invisible Life"] is a drama of resilient women, thoughtless men and crushingly unrealized dreams, told with supple grace, deep feeling and an empathy that extends in every direction.

Aïnouz imbues Invisible Life with an intimacy that’s at once blunt about bodily needs and evocative of the lushness of inner lives: globetrotting cinematographer Hélène Louvart saturates the film with palm greens, lusty reds and beachfront blues, and the sound design is alive with sounds of wind, water, and chirping birds.

Nothing quite prepares you for the ecstatic, chromatic intensity of Karim Aïnouz’s Invisible Life. To call the film a riot of color doesn’t begin to do it justice: color here doesn’t so much riot as surge, swoon, ebb and flow in a delirious tide of euphoria, and sometimes solemnity.

Male boorishness and female over-excitement are ladled on to a visceral degree that strains belief and, worse, makes us want to look away. Traducing genuine suffering as mere histrionics... Aïnouz unnerves and alienates where he might illuminate.

“Invisible Life” is a modern melodrama that’s proud to be one. Its mix of vivid period detail and raw frankness about sexuality and poverty and women’s oppression is heady and bracing; its depiction of female friendship and love is pointedly ferocious.

Much of this is relentlessly bleak and hopeless—true to reality, perhaps, but also repetitious and dramatically inert.

[The film's dilemmas] are slotted into the most conventional of aesthetic paradigms, from the over-reliance on classical music for conjuring emotion to the avoidance of aimless contemplation and silence. The truth is that Brazilian cinema, even when its stories call for experimentation, is too often stuck between the contrite drama of its televisual tradition and a devotion to the most classical, and stale, blueprint of American cinema.