The brutality is not simply that a hopeful woman dies before her dreams come true. Amaral brings narrative significance and annihilation almost into contact. For a few moments the world ahead contains more Macabéa than the world behind ever did. Her previous life can finally be mistaken for the beginning of a story. Then there is no future. Her hour of the star.
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Macabéa is not important. There is something indecent about saying this of another person, even a fictional one. We have developed entire vocabularies to avoid it. Every life has value; everyone contains multitudes; no one is truly ordinary. Such consolations may even be necessary. They are also strangely useless in the presence of Macabéa.
She works, eats, sleeps, listens to the radio, learns odd facts. She acquires a boyfriend and loses him. She gets hungry. She coughs. She has preferences she can barely explain. Then she dies. Very little changes because she has lived, and nothing stops because she is gone.
Suzana Amaral’s The Hour of the Star begins its cruelty there, before poverty can explain everything. Macabéa is poor, Northeastern, badly educated, socially clumsy, transplanted to São Paulo and badly equipped for nearly every code through which the city distributes dignity. Her disposability touches something even less flattering: most human beings are small. We occupy a tiny portion of the world for a very short time, want things of questionable consequence, embarrass ourselves, misunderstand people, and disappear while traffic continues somewhere outside. Macabéa simply has fewer protections against this fact than most.
Marcélia Cartaxo gives her a body that never seems fully instructed in what to do with itself. Her shoulders slope and her gestures arrive without polish. A cramped smile sometimes appears before a situation has earned one. She often looks a fraction of a second behind everyone else, as though words must cross some additional distance before producing a response. In rooms where other people seem to understand their function, Macabéa merely occupies space.
At work, she sits at a typewriter among desks, papers, machines, and people who appear to know why they are there. Her boss criticizes her typing. She does not flare up or collapse theatrically; she folds into the criticism. Her posture makes employment seem less like an exchange of labor for money than a favor someone might revoke. There is no hidden genius waiting beneath this timidity, no secret eloquence or exceptional competence suppressed by circumstance. She types badly.
Cinema frequently rescues insignificant people by proving that they were exceptional after all. The washerwoman possesses astonishing courage. The clerk writes poetry. The quiet girl reveals an intelligence no one noticed. These fantasies are generous, but their generosity depends on a strange concession: the ordinary person becomes worthy of attention only after the story discovers that she was never truly ordinary.
Macabéa gets no such rescue. Cartaxo refuses to organize her suffering into attractive signals. Her pauses are not always pregnant; sometimes they are simply pauses. Her smiles do not explain her. Even unhappiness can seem to arrive without the expressive ceremony that usually tells an audience where to locate emotion. When Olímpico leaves her for Glória, she is wounded without knowing how to make the wound eloquent. The scene is funny and ugly and sad at once. She lacks the sophistication required to turn pain into something beautiful.
Almost everything else about her is painfully legible. She is poor, badly dressed, awkward, unable to present herself according to the expectations around her. Her boss sees incompetence. Olímpico sees limited social usefulness. Glória sees the difference between them. Strangers can notice that something about her is off. Macabéa is not invisible. She is visible in the cheapest possible way: as category, defect, inconvenience, comparison.
Amaral even refuses to make her poverty clean. The boardinghouse room is packed with beds, bodies, reused things, no real privacy. At night Macabéa wakes coughing, reaches down for food left near the floor, bites into a greasy chicken leg, lowers her underwear, urinates into a chamber pot, handles everything with the same fingers, then returns to bed. The sequence does not pause to transform any of this into degradation with a capital D. Eating, pissing, touching, sleeping: one action follows another. The next morning, one of the women asks whether she is going to bathe before work. Macabéa says no.
After that, her appearance changes. Her clothes are no longer merely cheap but worn into her. The hair flattened against her head begins to seem greasy rather than simply badly arranged. It is one of those moments when an image develops a smell: stale fabric, sweat, food, unwashed hair. Macabéa probably stinks.
Sympathy becomes cheap when its object has first been cleaned up for us. Macabéa is not charmingly poor. Her bodily neglect is not secretly adorable. She can inspire revulsion. The film does not compensate by giving her perfect manners, hidden brilliance, good hygiene, noble suffering, or an especially photogenic misery. She does not become easier to love just because the camera stays with her. São Paulo has no need to hate such a person. It can simply use her.
That is the Babylon of The Hour of the Star: not an apocalyptic city of obvious evil but a machine vast enough to absorb private lives without knowing much about them. Labor enters. Money circulates. Bodies move. Products are purchased. Information travels. Desire attaches itself to whatever materials happen to be available.
Macabéa types, rides buses, drinks Coca-Cola, listens to Rádio Relógio, and stores away facts that have no practical function in her life. She is not outside modernity. Quite the opposite: modernity reaches her constantly.
The radio may be its most precise form. Voices arrive from somewhere else, impersonal and continuous, bringing names, measurements, trivia, scraps of knowledge. Macabéa listens with an intensity wildly disproportionate to what this information can do for her. She repeats facts to Olímpico as though each one might enlarge the space of her life. It does not. The broadcast keeps talking whether she understands, misunderstands, coughs, sleeps, or falls silent. The world enters the room without noticing the listener. Macabéa can know that something exists and still have no path toward it.
Coca-Cola belongs to the same traffic of fragments. Calling her a victim of consumer culture explains very little. What authentic set of desires was she supposed to possess before advertising corrupted it? Desire needs material. Movie stars, radio voices, products, other women, Olímpico’s ambitions: she takes pieces wherever she finds them. The culture that excludes her also supplies the scraps from which she tries to imagine a self.
Poverty is easy to aestheticize. Dirty walls, broken objects: all can become evidence of the filmmaker’s sensitivity. Here the interiors are cramped without becoming precious. Offices remain offices. Streets retain their indifference. Macabéa’s humiliation does not cause the city to look more expressive. She never quite masters the space around her. Money, among other things, can buy some distance from that vulnerability. A wealthy person is permitted to be mediocre.
This may be one of wealth’s least discussed privileges. Money buys privacy for failure. It buys another chance after professional incompetence. It creates distance between a foolish decision and catastrophe. It allows an ordinary person to be indecisive, unremarkable, physically weak, socially inept, and still remain buffered from some consequences of being so. Wealth does not abolish mediocrity but makes it survivable. Macabéa has almost no such insulation; her ordinariness sits too close to the edge.
Olímpico has understood something about the danger of that position. His solution is crude but recognizable: manufacture importance before anyone assigns you insignificance. He talks as though a sufficiently forceful future might be spoken into existence. He boasts, projects, imagines advancement. His vanity is ridiculous, but it contains a fragment of social intelligence. He knows that being nobody is dangerous.
Macabéa is a terrible accomplice for this project. Her radio facts do nothing for his ambitions. Neither does the way she attempts conversation. At one point she tells him, with complete seriousness, that she likes nails and screws very much and asks whether he does too. It is a perfect Macabéa sentence. Nothing in it is metaphor. Nothing is witty. She reaches for intimacy and produces hardware. Olímpico wants a future but Macabéa, naively, offers nails and screws.
Her awkwardness has no prestige value. Her body does not improve his social image. Even affection becomes contaminated by prospects. Glória is easier for him to read. She inhabits femininity with more confidence and moves through social codes with less friction. She knows better what is supposed to count as desirable. Macabéa keeps arriving with the wrong object, the wrong response, the wrong appetite, the wrong rhythm. She is bad at wanting correctly.
Then Madame Carlota gives her a plot. Fernanda Montenegro enters the film like a different weather system. Carlota is expansive where Macabéa contracts. She fills space with voice, gesture, confidence, anecdote. She knows how to turn fragments into sequence and sequence into destiny. For Macabéa, this is something she has scarcely had before: a way to imagine one thing leading to another.
Carlota promises money, transformation, love, a handsome foreigner. For the first time, the future arrives not as another day but as an arrangement of events. Suddenly Macabéa has a future tense. Until then, she has experienced things without acquiring much sense of progression. She works but does not build a career. She dates but does not accumulate intimacy. She collects information without becoming educated. She consumes without approaching prosperity. Time moves, but very little in it suggests preparation.
Carlota changes the meaning of what has already happened. The humiliations can become a first act. Olímpico’s abandonment can become the necessary disappointment before true love. Poverty can become temporary rather than merely continuous. What looked like a life of disconnected indignities can be reread as prologue. Carlota makes Macabéa important by giving her plot.
How familiar this mechanism is. Human beings routinely rescue themselves from insignificance by turning sequence into destiny. Suffering becomes preparation. Childhood explains adulthood. A disappointment proves necessary because something better eventually arrives. Cinema has trained us especially well in this superstition: a protagonist’s humiliations rarely remain merely humiliations. They acquire shape. They lead somewhere. Now Macabéa’s might too.
She leaves Carlota oriented toward a future she can picture. The city has not changed, but its surfaces suddenly seem available to expectation. Something might happen to her, something good. She has just learned to anticipate herself. Then the car hits her.
The brutality is not simply that a hopeful woman dies before her dreams come true. Amaral brings narrative significance and annihilation almost into contact. For a few moments the world ahead contains more Macabéa than the world behind ever did. Her previous life can finally be mistaken for the beginning of a story. Then there is no future. Her hour of the star.
The title is obscene in its accuracy. A star is someone people look at, someone around whom a narrative arranges itself. Macabéa has spent the film failing nearly every conventional test of stardom: glamour, talent, eloquence, spectacular suffering, even the ability to make misery attractive. After the collision, movement stops. People gather. The woman who had passed through so many spaces without becoming their center now interrupts circulation simply by lying in the street. An anonymous pedestrian has become an event. For once, Macabéa has an audience.
The city cannot know everyone. No one can mourn every stranger, ask every typist about her childhood, understand each passenger on a bus. Some measure of indifference is built into life among millions of people. The world will always contain more lives than anyone can witness, and no society can abolish anonymity or death. But societies do decide whether an ordinary life can remain ordinary without becoming disposable. Macabéa is tiny because we all are. She is crushed because some people are allowed to be tinier than others.
Clarice Lispector’s eponymous novel approaches Macabéa through Rodrigo S.M., a narrator tormented by the act of turning her into literature. Amaral chooses a different discomfort. Cartaxo’s body is simply there, occupying the image, refusing much of the expressive assistance that might make looking at her morally satisfying.
We can still congratulate ourselves for recognizing the woman whom other people fail to recognize. We can enjoy her awkwardness because the frame makes it funny, experience deprivation at the safe distance of aesthetic appreciation, and leave feeling that attention itself has done something virtuous.
Macabéa makes that difficult because she never earns our attention in the approved ways. She does not become articulate, uncover hidden courage, explain herself, or turn suffering into wisdom. She remains awkward, dirty, badly educated, intermittently funny, frequently opaque. We have looked at her without entirely possessing her. That may be as much dignity as the film can offer without lying.
Macabéa was not secretly destined for greatness. Her death does not deprive the world of some masterpiece she might have produced. History will not reorganize itself around her absence. She was here, and the city continues. Offices still need typists. Radios keep transmitting facts to unknown listeners. Men rehearse futures in which their names will matter. Women learn the gestures by which desire recognizes them. Cars move through streets toward destinations that do not include Macabéa. Soon there will be no practical reason for anyone there to remember her name. We do. That is not quite the same as having saved her.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
