I’ve never been taught how to pronounce Portuguese words. Obrigada sounds like obrigado, sounds like brigado. A man I met in a hostel seemed not to know the difference. In Romance languages there is always a masculine and feminine. I know that hoje is the word for today, which sounds (in my head) like hoy, in Spanish. Oye, which is kind of like “hey” in Spanish, looks to me like an eye.
On a recent weekend, a group of us at the crosswalk let a truck make a left turn as the light switched from yellow to red. It reminded me that sometimes the big guys are also the underdogs. In Toll, Carolina Markowicz’s new film which premiered at TIFF, Suellen (played by Maeve Jinkings) is late for work. There’s the tyranny of industrialized rock ascending to the heavens in the shot. She hails a truck driver, perhaps the only plausible person passing by this landscape of desolation. Sure, get in, he says. He’s going by the toll station.
It seemed to me that there was quite a bit of hype about Markowicz’s new work at TIFF this year, but maybe that was just me paying too much attention to my email inbox at imprecise times. TIFF’s online programme description reads in part:
“Confirming herself as one of Brazil’s clearest voices in current cinema, director Carolina Markowicz returns to the Festival after regaling audiences with last year’s uniquely dark and twisted comedy CHARCOAL. While training her singular gaze again on the dynamics by which a small family unit tries to stay afloat in the face of chaos, the tone and focus here differ greatly. The narrative and formal economy honed by Markowicz allow rising star Maeve Jinkings to widen her range within a story of motherhood as tough love gone wrong.”
I was excited to see Toll because of my visit to Rio de Janeiro before the pandemic. I also have come to understand recently the breadth of what “diverse” means in the context of Brazil, one of the most ethnically diverse places on earth. I try to guess at where the film takes place, I believe it is somewhere in Distrito Federal, maybe Brasília. But maybe it is in São Paolo.
In the film, Suellen is a single parent looking after her son Antonio (Kauan Alvarenga) who is exploring his queerness, posting videos in which they sing American pop ballads online. Suellen finds this concerning and is determined to help by spending hard earned money to send Antonio to a camp run by a “pastor” who had been “reformed” by bizarre practices that bring a distinct style of humour to the screen. We were laughing in the theatre.
Suellen’s live-in boyfriend, Arauto (Thomás Aquino) is and turns out to be an asshole. You realize that a woman’s life is not just the snapped bra straps and toilet-seat wipings, the cooking and looking after friends by buying them condoms they can’t afford—but a woman’s life is being cheated, again and again, not being able to choose what or who she is cheated by. It’s simply resigning yourself to this kind of life: forgetting. I thought of Penelope, who in Greek mythology is the wife of Odysseus. At night she undoes the work on her loom to keep her suitors at bay one more day. But the more tragic fate is one that is surmised by the undoing that isn’t intentional.
There’s a scene toward the end of the film, when Suellen and Antonio are sitting together outside. “You haven’t gone to the pedágio?” she said incredulously, looking at the belongings Antonio has brought to her. “No,” Antonio says, “The cafeteria.” The sky looks like it’s going to rain, and then it does. The next frame is after the rain I have imagined.
The film ends on a loving note, set in a space between domesticity and industry: at a cafeteria, where people are nourished by food and performance. Suellen has a new job serving people food behind the counter. The end credits roll just as she is scolded by her manager who shows her how to be more efficient in some way. She repeats what she is told to better understand.