She Comes Back Thursday

The title of André Novais Oliveira’s She Comes Back on Thursday is an emblem of the film. It reveals and it hides at the same time. 

Yes, on Thursday the wife returns to her 38-year marriage from a trip. But she says she’s coming back to her husband only to leave him. He doesn’t have the will to leave her, for his other woman, so she’ll leave him. But she lacks the emotional energy to do even that. She drops dead on the street. We infer that it’s a fatal faint because her family’s response is to gather around the TV screen, no emotional expression, no connection. The images hide the meaning we infer. The absence of a funeral means she’s dead. 

Note this: the film is not a documentary (contrary to the IMDB label). Oliveira stars in the film along with his parents, brothers and friends, but they’re performing a fictional vision of a family whose members don’t connect meaningfully with each other and who live a passionless existence. This is the paradox, for we associate Brazil with effusive passion. The husband fixes fridges but he can’t fix the chill in his emotional life. He says he loves his wife but he’s having an affair with a younger woman. There is no spark to that relationship either. She’s leaving him, but to try to win her back all he can do is cite her new lover’s criminality.
     Though the father loves her little daughter he seems detached even in their one scene of play. His warmest expression is remarking that her doll looks pretty in that chair. That is as arch as his attempt to recover the marital romance by dancing with his wife to an old song. Nobody says “I love you” in this film. The father and mother share a bed but swaddle in their separate blankets. 

True to our image of Brazil, the film abounds with music. But the songs don’t celebrate life so much as articulate the malaise the characters feel but can’t express or acknowledge or escape. After his wife’s implied death the father sings along to a radio song about a deeply grieved heart. But he’s singing it because he’s not otherwise feeling it. The expression takes the place of the feeling. From the unnecessary samba that calls for a new dance, a new love, to Dinah Washington’s This Bitter Earth, the lyrics portray the characters’ life of lost love, lost spirit. 

The two brothers live their own semi-detachment in their relationships. Their greatest excitement comes from watching TV, especially a video that cuts a screaming goat into a Justin Bieber number. That’s another emblem: an animal scream against our vapid triviality. But they’re only amused by it. Hence, too, the sudden eruptions of energy when a dog or a cat enter the scene. 

The characters’ emptiness is not caused by their class, nor by poverty, just by their loss of a will to look for beauty in their world and in each other, their fear of connecting. Even the lads’ football game is played out in long shot. We’re told of the side’s comeback from a 4-1 deficit but we see or feel none of it.

The film has some striking compositions, from the opening abstract to the last family darkness, illuminated by some TV silliness. But the elements in the composition are usually ugly. Peeling walls and climbing pipes  form striking compositions but they bespeak a sordid affront to nature. 

With its lack of dramatic event, its abstemious palette and its prolonged real-time scenes, the film has a documentary feel. What this fiction documents is a modern entropy, a passivity, a withdrawal from life. After the — frankly dull to watch — slow urban scenes, when the family heads out to a seaside vacation, the film suddenly speeds up. But nature doesn't enliven them either. The son enters the water only to flop on his back and drift.  

     This family with their implicit alienation provides a cautionary example of the modern existential dilemma. They have enough to survive, from material goods to career to family connections, but they lack the will or commitment to make anything of them. They float through their lives. The father has the strength to carry fridges up and down stairs and to attract a much younger lover. But that avails him nothing without his lost zest for life.
     Is there any positive character here? There's the woman who loves her fridge and will kick up a storm if it's not repaired and delivered on time. At least she cares about something. But the real model may be the young guy who helps the father carry the fridge down the dangerous stairs. He's game. He's ever hopeful that the next client might be "a hottie," that he might fall in love. He fumbles the fridge, sure, but he's in there trying. He embodies the spirit his boss and his family have lost.