film fatales #132: elena (petra costa, 2012)

This is the twenty-third film I have watched in "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2021-22", "A 33 week long challenge where the goal each week is to watch a previously unseen feature length film from a specified category." This is the 7th annual challenge, and my third time participating (my first year can be found at "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-20", and last year's at "My Letterboxd Season Challenge 2020-21"). Week 23 is called "Essentially Brazilian Week":

Was already thinking of making this list a weekly theme for this Season's Challenge, and this comment from a Brazilian Letterboxd user sealed the deal:

"Here on Brazil, our cinema is underappreciated, people just watch bad comedy movies and have a group who says we have a bad cinema, they don't know the classics and they think we just have five good movies: Dog's Will, Central Station, the two Elite Squad movies and City of God. See lists like this makes me happy,"

-O Legado Cinematográfico

This week's challenge is to watch a previously unseen Essential Brazilian film from Lost in Film's's list.

Another example of why I like doing this challenge: I knew nothing about Elena, or Petra Costa for that matter. Of the 107 films on the Essential Brazilian list, I'd only seen four. So welcome to a new experience.

Turns out, Elena is a documentary, which I didn't know ... OK, I'll quit, you get the point, I am clueless. The title character, Elena, is the older sister of the director, Petra Costa. Only one other person appears in the cast list, and she is Elena and Petra's mom. Petra Costa uses a combination of sources to construct her movie. There are home movies (Elena got her first movie camera when she was 13), an old diary of Elena's, and interviews Petra conducted with people in Elena's life. Elena, an aspiring actress, had moved to New York when Petra was 7 years old. After a return to Brazil, Elena is accepted into a university in New York, and she returns there, with her mother and Petra moving with her.

During that time, Elena kills herself ... it's not explained why, her family doesn't know, and that compounds their grief with the feeling they might have been part of the cause. The core of the film is Petra working her way through her relationship with Elena. She looked up to her big sister, and later identified with her (people comment on how much Petra looks like Elena). There is a sense that Petra is struggling not to repeat Elena's sad ending.

I was reminded more than once of Sarah Polley's great movie Stories We Tell. Polley deconstructs the rules of documentary and then puts them back together. Costa's film has arty touches, but it is a more straightforward documentary than Polley's film. And perhaps not as involving for the viewer, although I can imagine if you'd been through a similar experience to Costa, you would be very involved. Elena is not off-putting, but it is insular, a bit distancing. It's a strong movie, nonetheless.