Vil, má

A drawing room with salmon-coloured walls, tapestries, busts, house plants, a dressmaker’s dummy. In a velvet armchair with gold trim sits Wilma Azevedo, 74, Brazil’s “queen of sadomasochistic literature”. She is asked by the director to tell the story of her life, which quickly branches out into a series of detailed erotic anecdotes involving green bananas, dildos made of sandpaper and over-stimulated nerves. In her heyday, she received 300 love letters a month, an incredible success story. Sometime her memory fails her, at which point the young actress in the background, who is supposed to play her in an upcoming film, comes to her aid. Halfway through the film, which purports to be research, the armchair is reclined slightly and the protagonist then tells another life story, featuring a similarly pornographic narrative, but one that also gives an account of a journalist’s difficult emancipation, navigating the dangerous terrain of male fantasies. In static shots of a moving figure, a still life of passions retold comes into focus.