ECLIPSE

ECLIPSE, by Djin Sganzerla, is an essential film for the current Brazilian and global moment.
Interweaving aesthetics and politics, dense characters and a well-crafted screenplay, under excellent overall direction, Eclipse prompts reflection on the culture of patriarchal-colonial violence and how women can survive it.

Eclipse unfolds amidst opposing forces within a thought-provoking internal geometry. Visible and invisible, what is and what appears to be, produce a play of shadows between the film’s colors. Nature and culture, sky and earth, forest and city, animal and human, man and woman, feminine and masculine, intuition and science, reason and sensibility, captivity and freedom are the opposing forces, sometimes in communion, sometimes in conflict, that structure the plot.

Perhaps the jaguar is its main character, even though it seems like a parallel factor punctuating the narrative involving the two sisters, Cleo and Nalu. In Amerindian cosmologies, the jaguar is the most powerful of beings. The “jaguar” is the destiny of heroes. In Eclipse, it is an emblem of the woman attacked and “hunted,” but who, by her very nature, does not yield to her survival instinct intimately linked to dignity, freedom, and autonomy. Courage is the most basic reaction to the violation of these values.

From Nalu’s escapes through the woods to the scene where Cleo crosses the house and reaches the street, what we see is the affirmation of the jaguar as destiny. Distributing the narrative’s imagistic energy, the jaguar is the link between the two sisters who, each in her own way, fulfill their destiny of becoming the jaguar themselves. This is the case with Nalu, the indigenous sister, bearer of the jaguar’s spirit since her home in the forest where an ancestral grandmother lives. Cleo becomes the urban sister, an astronomer, who receives a sculpture in the shape of a jaguar’s head as a gift from Nalu’s grandmother, an emblem of her familial recognition.

The plot revolves around the encounter of these women whose historical bond is one of blood and violence, while a supra-historical bond of recognition develops throughout the narrative, culminating in the sisters’ love for one another and the establishment of sisterhood. Nalu was abused by her father, while Cleo will recall that her father also abused her in childhood.
Despite this abject bond, they become women who learn to defend themselves, who are free, wise, and dignified. Sisterhood is the notion that emerges and asserts itself throughout the film. But the encounter between them is also marked by what Vilma Piedade called “dororidade” — a solidarity rooted in shared pain. The pain that unites them is the same pain that leads them to fight together.

In this context, female solidarity is confronted with male fraternity. It is the power of sisterhood, of sisterly love, that will unmask the falseness of Cleo’s husband. Loving towards his wife at home, he has a hidden practice. Along with a group of men, including his own father, he participates in parties where recreational rapes of young women are practiced. The husband’s character is an emblem of predatory patriarchy, of abject fraternity, which seduces to create victims, which deceives, lies and manipulates behind the mask of a good man, a concerned son and a family man, while secretly practicing his criminal perversions. The house where Cleo lives, therefore, is not simply a home; on the contrary, its character as a captivity will become clear. The “caregiving” husband is, in fact, the predator in the lurking position, analogous to the handler of the jaguar in the zoo. The screenplay provides the path to this conclusion about the captive female jaguar: right at the beginning of the film, Cleo is driving the car and, feeling nauseous because she is pregnant, needs to stop to vomit at the exact moment she hears on the radio that a jaguar held in captivity has attacked its caretaker.

Thus, the film subtly demystifies the patriarchal system: the deception of romantic love, the charade of the perfect husband and family, the home presented as a dangerous territory where motherhood can be a trap. Eclipse is a sequence of “eclipses” that reveal what the patriarchy would like to keep hidden and what a woman “astronomer,” the emblematic woman of wisdom, research, patience, and firmness, will know how to name.

The film makes no apology for “overcoming,” “resilience,” or anything of the sort; it doesn’t mystify clichés. On the contrary, it presents them in order to elegantly dismantle them. Furthermore, Eclipse makes it clear that, despite the personal strength of women, they need each other to survive the violence directed at them in the predatory circle of patriarchy.

A visual essay on sisterhood, Eclipse is the story of the building of love between sisters and a struggle for a good and fair life.

Text by Márcia Tiburi