Érica Sarmet | Uma Paciência Selvagem Me Trouxe Até Aqui (A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here) / 2021

letting it all out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Érica Sarmet (screenwriter and director) Uma Paciência Selvagem Me Trouxe Até Aqui (A Wild Patience Has Taken Me Here) / 2021 [26 minutes] 

 

Interestingly, of the seven short lesbian-oriented films I saw at the NewFest 2022, six of them were notably different in tone and approach than any of the gay male films I saw in the same festival. While the gay films moved directly to the heart of their subjects, dealing head-on with the issues at stake—desire, coming out, the search for changing self-identity, anger, and acceptance—the films about lesbian relationships approached their subjects, for the most part, obliquely, spoke of love in almost whispered terms, shyly pointed to oppositions rather than announcing them, and hinted at coming out rather than representing any such actual confrontation. Although this is, of course, a ridiculously small sampling of such films to make any generalizations, it reminded me that, for example, the “coming out” film was rare in the lesbian vault of LGBTQ movies. Although there are numerous films demanding attention for the lesbian cause, there are far many more movies that prefer to discuss those very issues through what I might describe as a “slanted” approach often surrounded by a veneer of domesticity.

     Actually, I admired these subtler approaches, having long ago tired of the endless visual rhetoric of thousands of outpourings of hurt, anger, and frustration in gay male films.   

     The exception to this observed phenomenon, Brazilian filmmaker Érica Sarmet’s 2021 movie, even carries within its Adrienne Rich-inspired title the “wild patience” is has taken the lead figure of this work, now an older lesbian who had almost given up an active life in her community, to come to the open declarations and revealing sexual representations that her film proclaims.

      Vange (Zélia Duncan) seems to be sitting on the outside of her own world as enjoying a drink at street café she observes the youth around her playing and teasing openly about their costumes, appearance, and sex itself. Vange evidently determines to return to lesbian bar from where she has long been absent and there meets a curious young woman, Rô (Bruna Linzmeyer) who’s intrigued and fascinated by the older lesbian woman, as well as being admittedly attracted to her.

      When Vange leaves for the evening, explaining that she has a long way to travel on her motorbike, Rô outrightly asks if she can join her. Vange accepts and the two go racing off to the elder’s home, looks of joy as they sit close to one another with the wind on their faces.

      After an apparently sexually satisfying night, Vange returns Rô back to the city, where the younger girl immediately introduces her to what appears to be a commune of lesbian activists with whom she lives and spends most of her days.

     Almost immediately, the story shifts from being a personal re-outing of Vange to a love-letter to lesbianism addressed to the world, as the younger women, embraces the older with great interest for the depth of history she provides.

     The film then metamorphizes almost into an intemperate and most certainly impatient advertisement of the joys of lesbianism as the women engage in a group orgy, demonstrating the numerous positions of possible lesbian sexual pleasures, presented almost as an answer to those millenniums of male taunts that question how lesbians might sexually satisfy themselves.

     After, the women march to a local public beach where, with two boys playing with a ball in the background, they set up camp.

       The film ends with a complete abandonment of patience proclaiming the lesbian cause in logos, flags, and shouts. Obviously the long patience of woman like Vange has worn itself out, and the wildness overtaken their hearts. 

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).