Daniel Guarda | Naquele Dia Escuro (That Dark Day) / 2022

caring in society that won’t

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Guarda (screenwriter and director) Naquele Dia Escuro (That Dark Day) / 2022 [29 minutes]

 

At the beginning of Brazilian director’s Daniel Guarda highly moving short drama, That Dark Day, presents a day on which it seems the world might end. Jair Bolsonaro is in power in Brazil and Trump in the White House when on that day in 2019 when a city councilor Victor is taken away by car in São Paulo and presumably shot, at 3:00 the sky dark because of a meteorological phenomena and smoke from forest fires along the Amazon highway.

      The movie then shifts to the aftermath focusing on a young trans man, Fabio (Miguel Filpi) who works as a caregiver, now focusing on an elderly woman near death, Louise (Isabelle Lenoble). Gently he daily cares for her as he silently grieves the end of his own relationship with, we later discover was the gay man Victor e Felipe (Athos Souza), the same one who has been taken away to be shot by Brazilian rightist vigilantes.

      Little by little as he shares an exercise regiment and small meals with her, she opens up about her own upbringing, and particularly her loneliness from the fact that her three well-off children all live in her native France and seldom come to visitor her in Brazil. Her own relationship with her husband has been unhappy. But now with Fabio, she begins to open up sharing both her

sorrows and joys of her quickly disappearing life.

   Fabio, in turn, begins to tell her of his own life, how we was adopted by a loving couple but who left him alone much of the time, while he, himself, feeling that he was a boy trapped in a young girl’s body with no one to talk to about it, and those days, not computer to rush to in order see if others felt as you did.

     A gay parade parade finally awoke him to his identity, as he suddenly determined to go through the process of transforming himself and his body into the handsome young hirsute man he is today.

     In the background of their gentle and loving conversations is a society that is increasingly hostile to sexual, political, and cultural differences (much like in the US), where transgender children like he has been must now for years before getting medical help because of governmental cuts to such programs. Victor had clearly been working for further LGBTQ+ representation in a society made of cis gender heterosexuals who have no patience for their voices in society, ideas parroted by a taxi driver in a car in which Fabio is riding to work.

     The picture ends, inevitably, with a call from Louise’s daughter Claire to tell him that her mother has died, and in the last scene we see that Fabio has now inherited Louise’s dog.

      That Dark Day is not only a lovely movie about two desperately lonely souls coming together to heal and comfort one another, but as the director himself describes it, “talks about social control and repression, gender censorship, and sexual orientation reinforced by power structures (and their consequences)….The short also reinforces discussions on discrimination, moral judgment, and psychological violence caused by heteronormativity which, in turn, suggests and elaborates behavioral patterns within social structures. That Dark Day entertains while speaking about cultural habits, deconstructs taboos and prejudice, and connects the viewer to different realities in divergent fields.

      This truly melancholy and lovely movie won the “Silver Rabbit” award as the Audience’s Choice for the Best Brazilian Short Film Festival of Diversity Culture in 2022.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).