Gustavo Vinagre and Gurcius Gewdner are a duo of filmmakers who, despite their young age, are already veterans in the Brazilian cinema. Vinagre focuses more on queer stories, ranging from his work in films like Três Tigres Tristes, A Rosa Azul de Novalis, and Deus tem AIDS. Meanwhile, Gewdner leans towards trashy and eschatological horror and genre films, such as in Symbolicus Volume 1 and Pazacus: A Ilha do Dessarego. They bond to combine their elements in Privadas de Suas Vidas (Bowels of Hell). It is a horror that narrates about a killer toilet seat in a building in São Paulo, Brazil.
The Bizarre Plot of Privadas de Suas Vidas
In the film, Malu (Martha Nowill) is a party planner who balances her entrepreneurial life with the difficulty of being a single mother of twins. During one of the parties, a fifteen-year celebration, her son jumped over the toilet seat to check his fallen tooth, and it broke, killing him. The event leads to Malu’s post-traumatic stress disorder, preventing her from functioning well as a parent and businesswoman. Also, her child is a non-binary individual, a fact that Malu does not accept well, resulting in the diminishing of their experience, the constant use of the wrong pronouns, and the dead name. On top of that, she needs to organize a gender reveal party to lift her reputation as a party planner, while the building suffers from an event that provokes all of the toilet seats to act abnormally.
Pushing Eschatological Horror to the Extreme
At first, the plot of Privadas de Suas Vidas might sound absurd and silly. However, the directorial duo creates a film that dialogues a trashy horror visual, flexing the conventions of the killing objects sub-genre, and a narrative about trauma and the generational clash. However, contrary to the new wave of horror films released by boutique distributors that deal with trauma at first sight, and the conventions are not a central part of it, Vinagre and Gewdner want to stretch the concept to the extreme. The directors are not afraid of the grotesque and disgusting; hence, they expose multiple scenes of feces in the most varied forms and shapes, including the transformation of individuals into it. Throughout its almost two hours, there are multiple scenes of defecation and excrement exploding, following its concept of the escathological as the element of a story about loss, grief, gender, and sexuality.
A Committed Ensemble Cast
Furthermore, the film benefits from a fabulous casting of character actors who embody the absurdity of the film. Brazilian veterans like Otávio Müller, Regina Braga, Maria Gladys, and Gilda Nomace share the screen with recent names of the national dramaturgy, such as Chandelly Braz, Marco Pigossi, Olívia Torres, and Benjamin Damini. Those actors embrace a project that is unafraid of the genre limits or subtlety; it is a film about excess. Therefore, the actors invest in the exaggeration of their characters’ tropes. Pigossi and Braz are a couple desperate for fame and online clout, but who treat their disabled child terribly. Torres plays an American fortuneteller who moves to downtown São Paulo to cleanse people’s energy through the interpretation of their feces. Her character leans toward the absurdist comedy with an over-the-top accent that mimics a Russian pronunciation. Yet, the most compelling performance is Müller’s, who manages to shift from the drama to the slapstick comedy promptly.
On top of that, the film thrives through its visual exuberance, the lack of polishing toward the graphic imagery, and the search for an artificiality in its dramaturgy that immerses you in that universe. As soon as Malu’s life shifts after her son’s death, the colors wear out, and it gets darker, both in the violence and in the color grading. It manages to imprint the opaque look without losing the vibrance of its pastel fake-ish colors that provide the satirical effect to those characters. Still, the film’s duration is excessive, leading to a repetitive nature in its events, such as the clashes between Malu and their child and the escalation of the chaos. The result, despite an overlong conclusion, is the exploration of the eschatological trashy horror codes, which emphasize the visual wounds and pains of the protagonist. In that context, there is no better manner of confronting her trauma than a conflict with an exploding toilet seat. Thus, the excess answers the motivations and the narrative arcs of the lead character, suffering from unbearable pain.
Final Thoughts
Gustavo Vinagre and Gurcius Gewdner combine the usual thematic axis of the individual careers in Privadas de Suas Vidas. It is a trashy, disgusting satire that avoids the modern clichés of trauma in horror films and invests in the visual excess to create drama and urgency.
Privadas de Suas Vidas recently played at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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