Esta Não É a Sua Vida

What is life, anyway? Who can define it with certainty about what exactly is life and what truly composes it? Fact: if you're here reading this review you are alive and well and breathing, there's air over your lungs, a pulsating heart with rhythms and beatings, and a brain processing the words you're reading and forming an exact view of things at the same time the same brain keeps you alive with all of your internal systems. But there's also this thing called life where you act, work, play, plan things, evolve or deconstruct the world around you. In the words of Lennon, "Life happens when you're busy making other plans", therefore life is always escaping us when we try to live to the fullest or maybe think that we are living the exact life we wanted or dreamed of...or worse, the life others designed for us even though deep down inside we are dreaming of more. Who can truly say they lived a nice life, an accomplished life? Life, more than just the terms of breathing and existing, the thing that makes us go forward to some possible evolution or a higher development.

Although this slightly humored short film "Esta Não É a Sua Vida" ("This Isn't Your Life") is quite simplistic in its quiet and nice presentation, very easy to follow, I overcomplicated for you, fellow reader, because I've got here a very challenging film that made me question things in a manner that very few movies are capable of doing. It begins with actor José Mayer's voice presenting common people and their daily activities and giving one information about them that actually doesn't apply to them. Example: a little girl appears and the narration says that the girl never traveled to the artic; an old lady is revealed to never had been killed her parents. Eccentric explanations but whenever we look to those characters we have the chance to analyze the information given and if it applies to the person we are seeing. It's all curious to see. Then we get to our leading character.

Our main star here is a real woman, a lady by the name of Noeli Cavalheiro and she presents some facts of her life through the years. She reflects about her childhood and her past memories as a country girl who married early in life because of her father's influence, a man who created his girl to be the perfect housewife. Those were different times and there are still realities out there who demand that kind of thing. At the time depicted in the film, she was in her late 30's, married and with two kids but as the narrator says "This isn't your life". Noeli is more than that, as evidence in a downer bit where she reveals that she had other plans rather than following the life her father dictated she should follow, she had dreams of being a worker fulfill certain needs and all. So here's the challenge to us: the life she lives as a married woman, although happy and balanced, is a good life, it's a life after all or the one where she dreams of accomplishing things she never did and still has the possibilty for it? Living the dream or dreaming the life? We wonder yet we don't have enough living time to philosophize those things.

Writer/director Jorge Furtado, in his early career, made impressive and thought-provoking short films that dared to question things, dared to impress us with common people and the strange circumstances of life. His previous entry before this film was the amazing and shocking "Ilha das Flores" where he starts the movie with simple statistical facts about a tomato bought by a fictional character played by an actress, the whole process of how this tomato got into her hands and later in her meal, and the process of being thrown in the garbage and how some parts of this same tomato, when it finally reaches the dumping ground where is consumed by pigs living on a dump island where the food they reject (which they considered unfit for them), is later served to the poorest people of the place who survive because of the garbage. When you watch the movie, you walk out feeling terrified and disgusted by how mankind can sink so low in terms of humanity. But there's a catch: that place does not exist in reality, it's all fictional but it's made in such a believable and realistic way that you accept it as fact - altough we can certainly imagine this reality existing somewhere in a less developed country. It feels real.

I guess the same can be said about this film but in an almost opposite manner. It looks like a fictional work where Furtado hired an actress to present some facts about her character's life and the people audience will try to compose and analyze a view from the woman. Not the case. Noeli is real and the director simply showed up to her and asked her if he could follow and film her for a while, interview her and then he'd built his film around her. And to intrigues us more there's the narration telling us one thing, we process the information and we evaluate if we can believe that or believe the person we are seeing it - not to mention that whenever it's said that this isn't your life, the film is making a spoof on the classic TV program "This is Your Life" (here in Brazil we have similar formats with other names but one can get the spirit of the thing). Here, instead of following a famous personality, we have an anonymous from the crowd, with a quiet and simple life, not completely fulfilled but important and magnificent on its own because it is a life, there's value in there, and there's love, care, and appreciation given to this lady despite her belief that life is a little more than following the footsteps of many other women out there.

Mr. Furtado throws the matter on us. What is life? Are we living the life we really wanted or we're not there yet? Will we ever be there? Can we truly embrace and accept the life we have at this right moment? What are we doing with the life we have? Is it the life we build ourselves or others did it for us? There's so many variants to reflect and so little time to actually find a meaningful and positive answer.

Compared to Noeli, I don't have half of what she has, neither the same positive acceptance with what she has and the quiet resignation with what she doesn't have. I see her as a happy woman, who had some down's and out's but she made it positively well. But we have in common the fact that the life we have isn't the one we wanted. But it's never too late to get there. And I liked her so much that, if possible, I'd like to see Mr. Furtado going back all the way to that small town and track down her whereabouts and show us what happened to her in those 30-something years, like Michael Apted used to do in the "UP" series. I tracked down the name on the internet and of the three women with same name as hers, two are from South states (the region where she lives) and could only find (on all) civil actions in courts against banks and a condo (thankfully she isn't the source of trouble, others are causing on her). The most recent update is from this year, a couple of months ago.

For the most part, I can only hope she's alive, well and perhaps had accomplished many things that seemed impossible for her back in the early 1990's since society changed so much over the decades. And for giving me incredibly difficult insights that actually made me reconsider things about my life (and maybe I can act on it) I'm giving all the praise to this movie and everyone involved with. Thumbs way up! 10/10.