Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme six, part one - a South American film!
(Chosen by me!)
A preface: Limite shall not receive a numerical rating at this review's conclusion. Though claiming, "You watched this movie wrong!" is typically anathema to my perspectives as a critic and film fan alike, reviewing my own reactions as the film unfolded led me to believe I did exactly this. Per the Walter Salles video essay accompanying the film on Criterion Channel as of this writing, director Mário Peixoto came from an artistic background steeped in poetry and the numerous experimental film movements across Europe in the 1920s before anything we might consider the typical narrative cinematic form. His goals in creating Limite thus reflect this by placing emphasis on mood and movement far above any semblance of story in the manner of so many arthouse pictures, though it is not entirely a clean break. To make a quick comparison against Tabu and the larger F.W. Murnau oeuvre, where Murnau would use a subjective camera and non-literal filmic techniques to suggest more spiritual passages or plunge his world into total otherness whilst still telling a story, Peixoto deploys what few narrative elements he has in complete subservience to the emotional thematic explorations on-screen. Someone with more modern expectations of how films with narrative passages function might see these moments, and feel inclined to extrapolate narrative structural intent where there is none.
Or, put in simpler terms: the framing device with the boat threw me for a loop, because I thought it was going to be important to discern how each of the three silent, morose passengers came to be there, and spent more of the movie trying to puzzle out a beat-to-beat structure than appreciating the imagery and poetry Pexioto conjures. Limite is an incredibly difficult movie to sit through with this mindset, as its many exploratory and experimental passages come to feel like lengthy distractions that drag longer than one would like. Fortunately, I came to appreciate the film's actual intent further into the picture, but by the time I did so, I'd become fidgety and somewhat agitated, and so know I did not get the full and proper Limite experience. Trying to assign a rating under these circumstances would lead to an unfair and uninformed numerical score, one which threatens to stand out more than anything I have to say. So, on this understanding, I'll spend the rest of this review trying to communicate my analytical perspective on what Limite is an how it functions, and hopefully we'll get something more worthwhile from the exercise than me focusing on how I was, in a word, more bored than I'd've liked while watching.
So, that framing device. After we see a woman gazing into the camera with rough, handcuffed hands round her neck, visions of a distant, tumultuous sea dancing before her eyes, we fade (as we do for numerous shots across the whole film) to a ramshackle rowboat with three people inside, a man and two women. The man is perpetually bent over in contemplation, occasionally accepting something to eat or sharing a glance with his companions, but primarily affecting an air of one who wishes to never talk again. The first woman, dressed in white, though occasionally animate and friendly, soon comes to turn her back against her fellow seabound captives, and stare out at the waves without showing the camera her face for most of the film. The second woman, this one in black, lies on the boat's floor for much of the introduction, soon comes to sit next to the man in much the same pose, though she seems somewhat distressed by how the first woman will not make eye-contact. Towards the end of the film, the man spies something in the distance and dives off the boat to chase after it, and following a montage of foamy waves breaking against the rocks and one another, we find the first woman clinging to a board from the capsized boat, with no sign of her companions, or any human life for miles around.
The above represents the entirety of what Limite communicates about its characters in the framing device. Over the course of the first hour or so, we learn the man was a fisher who fell in love with another man's wife, the first woman was an escaped convict, and the second woman left a dissatisfactory marriage. This, now, represents the entirety of what Limite will tell us about its characters, for their attempts to recollect their experiences clash directly against the film's theme. Oftentimes when we follow them into their memories, we will trace their steps as they traverse long distances, only for the camera to get caught up in panning across a recently logged stretch of forest and have to jog back a few paces to find its subject crouched and weeping by a gate, or else wander away from their perspective entirety to focus on the wavering of a half-blown-away dandelion. Our camera is happy to sit behind one subject as she stares into a lake that appears to be a sky, only to go whirling through the air the second her attention is the tiniest bit distracted, pulling alley-oops and loop-de-loops through the sky in a total desynchronization with her literal experience. Sometimes it will track upwards into the pure white of sky and remain lost there for a good minute, or pan down across the blurred, radiant light from a white newspaper and white dress reflecting the midday sun, or float away from them to view the already striking fauna in the area through a negative filter that bathes all these sharp black objects in a white halo.
These people are not the camera's primary concern in Limite, and yet we always come back to them. When we do stick around to see what's going on, we find their lives little more than turbulent chaos. The man streaks through a field in agony, screaming out for someone as the camera rapidly zooms in on his face on the same cut again and again until he's tripping over the grassy hillside and can no longer remain upright. One woman is glimpsed at a sewing machine, the camera lingering over extreme close-ups of her various tools, before a tight view of her scissor blades finds her sliding a finger across the entire edge, and then cuts to black. The other spends quite a considerable time trudging along a dusty path, only to confront a man at the top of the stairs with a long, withering glower, before trudging back out to who knows where. And even still, when the camera bothers with a human perspective, it will leave these characters behind in favor of repeatedly zooming on a fountain hole spitting water, staring up at a pair of might carved crosses, or resting on a train wheel's pivot as it begins to spin away from the station. As a whole, the film only breaks from purely visual expression to communicate with language a total of two times - once when we glimpse a newspaper headline, and once when the man is told some particular information about the woman he's running an affair with that could only come through dialogue.
All of these sequences, sympathetic to the characters' lives or no, recognizably human or wholly nature-focused, are presented as memories. Flashbacks. We fades to and from them from within the rowboat, and when the characters are unable to strike up conversation, set about to paddling anywhere (as one of the woman fails to at one point), or do anything save sit and glower, they resolve to sit and glower and remember some more. And it must be understood, these are not typical filmic flashbacks, for your typical film will render a memory much the same way it renders literal, immediate reality; maybe you'll get a hazy filter or a hint of an unreliable narrator to differentiate the two states, but on the whole the effect is the same. With Limite, Pexioto seems determined to do nothing short of capture the entire experience of a memory.
You're a person if you're reading this, you know how it goes. The way your brain catalogs and retrieves information is not based in pure 1:1 recollection of events as they happened, and a memory is not ONLY the events as you perceived them. There's a complex tangle of associated emotions, wandering thoughts, trivial recollections, a sense of a wider life lived beyond the context of this one event. The most unimportant little moments stand out, and you may well recall the sight of a half-naked dandelion head dancing in the breeze better than your passage down a dusty road on a difficult day, or feel as if your head went spinning off a cliffside and into oblivion as you contemplated the last few hours, or remember the world as nothing but the view of a blinding white sky as you experience profound agony. From a cinematic perspective, it is incredibly difficult to capture a feeling so deep into the emotionally subjective as to leave behind any recognizable human experience, so the best way to capture this is by following impulse, and crafting images well beyond anything recognizably empathetic or human in the midst of what you present as a memory.
There's really no use in trying to understand the three characters trapped on the rowboat, as we see with the aforementioned final montage of waves. Much as listening to someone else recollect their dream can be boring because you don't have all the associations necessary to really GET it, watching someone remember as a film acknowledges the full extent of sensory ties and wandering thoughts tied to a memory is a difficult, frustrating exercise. You'll gleam feeling far more readily than logical sense, so Limite feels a sad, disgruntled, cornered experience that can tell you what emotional peaks marked these characters' final decision to get into a boat together, but never what events marked the journey beyond some broad sense of who they are and where they came from. Because this is completely divorced from the larger life experiences required to really grok their perspective, you see the limits of perception and communication come into sharp focus as the film goes on.
Trying to directly transplant a memory - not the words one would use to describe it, or the images one would use to represent the actual event it draws upon, but the full, complicated, messy extent of a memory, lengthy connective tendrils and all - is practically impossible. You'll sooner break the cuffs round your own neck that restrain you from communicating the whole, undiluted, compromise-free experience of your own life than get these three people except as emotional entities. Which, ultimately, is the best we can do in daily life anyhow.
I'm aware I do something like this any time I come across a really old film missing any part of itself, and I'm aware it's not entirely fair to either old silents fortunate enough to receive a full restoration or the ones completely lost to time, as it implies a nobility in being incomplete, but I think one can best understand Limite through the single scene Pereira de Mello and later the Mário Peixoto Archives were not able to restore. In the early going, as the quality of film degrades and increasingly obscures our view of proceedings, the man turns to the woman lying on the floor in the rowboat, and we cut to an intertitle indicating he helps her in some way. This represents one of the very few times the boatbound characters interact with each other in any meaningful way, and it is entirely obfuscated by footage too damaged to restore. It may seem odd to consider a fortuitous loss, until one remembers the film's opening and closing shots heavily imply the rowboat scenes too are a recollection of the woman with another's cuffs round her neck. Her back was turned to these events, and so the single most recognizably human event in the whole framing device is lost to the ages, the one meaningful moment of face-to-face interaction obliterated by there not being a memory to draw upon. Limits of memory, limits of celluloid, pretty much one and the same.
Through all this, I think it worth remembering that while I can draw all this analysis from Limite, it was still a frustrating film for me to watch, even as someone who normally deeply enjoys experimental and silent features. To anyone and everyone who seeks this out, be it through Criterion or one of the film's numerous YouTube uploads, I'd recommend the following - do not watch it as you would another film. Set aside notions of narrative satiation at the door, regardless of what appearances tell you during the framing device. Simply come to experience the imagery, internalize the feelings, empathize best you can with this deliberately splintered, obtuse attempt to explore how we can never fully grasp where these people came from and where they are going. It will play infinitely better with this perspective in mind, and perhaps even produce understanding greater than my own. Something like this deserves consideration on its own level, and while I've done my best to approximate an appreciation grounded at this altitude, my immediate, in-the-moment experience did not properly reflect this. Best I can do is provide a guidepost for you the reader, and hope to see with clearer eyes whenever I next watch.
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