Invisible Life (2019, Karim Aïnouz) (Patreon)

48/100

Odd mix of didactic and melodramatic, with neither mode much appealing to me, though the combination did at least hold my attention. It inevitably sounds defensive whenever a male critic makes this complaint, but gynocentric movies in which every single man onscreen is a nightmare just aren't dramatically compelling, even when they reflect the ugly truth about a patriarchal society. (Exceptions like House of Pleasures tend to cordon men off almost entirely, focusing on female solidarity rather than on the abuse that occasions it.) Here we've got the father who cruelly disowns his daughter when she first elopes and then shows up at home pregnant; the husband who apparently starts cheating four seconds after saying "I do"; the other husband who considers his wife's creative and professional ambition nothing more than a pain in his ass; the drug dealer who extorts sexual favors from a woman seeking morphine to mercy-kill her dearest friend/surrogate mother; etc. It's all a bit much (especially at 139 minutes), but at least that's in keeping with the narrative sudsiness, which eventually turns Invisible Life into the sororal* equivalent of a Nicholas Sparks adaptation. (It's actually based on a popular Brazilian novel, and definitely has that next-chapter feel.) I coped with the scene in which Guida and Eurídice just barely miss each other at a restaurant (while their respective kids briefly play together, unaware that they're cousins), but the contrivance that causes Eurídice to believe Guida dead is a real eye-roller, and still doesn't explain why Guida makes no effort whatsoever to find Eurídice in Vienna, even as she writes her a zillion heartfelt letters to be found and read half a century later. (Let the Sparks fly!) Still, Duarte and Stockler do fine work as the twin leads, and it's hard to be entirely unmoved by the epic story of extremely close siblings who part young and wind up never seeing each other again, due to a combination of others' vindictiveness and sheer bad luck. 

* I hate using this word, because it's so uncommon (compared to "fraternal") that it brings people up short. But there's no alternative, non-clumsy way to phrase that.