Caru Alves de Souz | Assunto de Familia (Family Affair) / 2011

an “affair” to remember

by Douglas Messerli

 

Caru Alves de Souz (screenwriter and director) Assunto de Familia (Family Affair) / 2011 [12 minutes]

 

The family members of Brazilian director Caru Alves de Souz’s Family Affair may all live closely under the single roof of their apartment, but they can hardly be described as a functional family or in any way happy as individuals trapped by the coincidence of blood kinship.

     The mother, Eunice (Cláudia Assunção), spends long hours staring out the open window onto the street below evidently watching the activities of her neighbors such as we glimpse in a neighborhood barbecue. Her husband, like thousands of others around the world, spends his free hours staring at sports in the television, demanding his wife bring him sandwiches and beer.

      Their eldest son, Cauã (Thiago Franco Balieiro) treats his younger brother Rossi (Kauê Telloli) as simply a household object to kick and keep away from as much as possible, while demanding his mother cook and serve for him in a manner more abusive than even her husband.   

  The two of them, mother and younger son, have almost a pact. The minute the game is over, the elder son and the father leaving the house for other activities, they switch on another station, probably a movie channel or a soap opera. She gladly serves sandwiches to Rossi, who thanks her for them, while begrudgingly serving up the missed supper she has saved on the back of the stove for Cauã.

      Pulling away a bottle of wine which Cauã has purloined from the back of a cupboard, she retreats to the storage hall to smoke, evidently forbidden, as her older boy reminds her, by her husband. The minute Cauã returns from his outing with friends, she retreats to her bedroom for a “nap,” in actuality, staring at the lost beauty of her face in a mirror and obviously regretting all the years she has served as a virtual slave to family life.

     Like his mother, Rossi also spends long hours staring out the window, seemingly having no friends and certainly not being allowed opportunities to make his own acquaintances. He and Eunice seem trapped in a world controlled by the macho patriarchs who themselves lead empty lives.

      The two friends Cauã returns with serve little more than buddies who share liquor and random comments on the soccer game and women. They might as well be looking out the window, even if their world is defined more by the television and the street itself.

      One of Cauã’s friends, however, seems somewhat more open to allowing Rossi into their presence. Seeing him peeking through the kitchen door, Cauã tells his brother to get lost, but the friend suggests he just wants a glass of water and demands he be let in. Once there, Rossi attempts to grab a glass of the whiskey they’re sharing, which his brother insists he leave alone. But the friends suggest he let the boy try it, which he does, somewhat reluctantly and not with great pleasure, while Cauã, treating it like a challenge as he does nearly everything, forces him to drink the whole thing, taunting him for wincing in dislike of the sweet bitterness. Again Cauã orders him out of their presence, chastising his friend for even talking to him.

     A short while later, the friend appears to have left the kitchen, encountering Rossi in the hall and asking him where he might find a cigarette. The boy takes him to the service room where the mother hides them, and offers him a smoke and a light. Once more, he offers the boy a new experience, a puff of his cigarette. And again, Rossi coughs and finds the experience unpleasant, the friend rubbing the boy’s chest a little as he asks if it burns.

     Cauã’s friend suggests he try once again, this time inhaling. The boy asks, “What’s the secret?” the friend responding, “You only have to breathe in. Like in a straw.” Rossi does so, coughing even more. The other boy laughs, moving directly in front of him to blow smoke in his face, a second later pulling his head toward him for a deep kiss which Rossi returns with a passionate force he has evidently been saving up for all these long years, the two engaging in what is clearly Rossi’s first kiss ever for a rather long few moments on screen.

    Finally, breaking away Rossi turns away with a huge grin on his face, hardly believing his fortune in having experienced such a sensuously enjoyable moment. This new sensation, unlike the drink and cigarette, is clearly something he totally enjoys.

     In the film’s last scenes Cauã and his friends are seen strutting down the street, shouting out about the soccer win for São Paulo, one neighbor throwing a flip-flop from an above window that hits his face. Swearing at the assailant, Cauã and his buddies continue their celebrational stroll, staring back to watch a woman who has just passed them.    

     But Rossi, back in the house, we now know has a secret that has changed everything for him, something that he can never share with his elder brother, but offers him a new sense of power in the fact that he has now been loved by one of his macho brother’s buddies. LGBTQ liberation begins always in such small ways, but has such huge ramifications. Certainly, we can suppose, Rossi will never again feel tortured by his brother’s constant dismissals of his very existence.

     As Alves de Souz demonstrates once more in her taut cinematic work, is just how heteronormative patriarchal attitudes negatively affect not only women but LGBTQ individuals as well. That both Eunice and Rossi remain so strong despite those forces is a testament to their own personalities and intellect.

 

Los Angeles, September 19, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021)