Fragile as the World (2001) is a hefty, slow-burn, dramatic affair about love, responsibility, longing, and loss. Aiming to be as evocative as possible, Fragile revolves around a young girl named Vera (Maria Gonçalves) and her equally immature lover Jo-ão (Bruno Terra) as they face the complexities of advancing age. As each attempts to balance between school, new expectations, and each other, the film unfolds with dramatic depth and dark themes about the cons of lifetime loving. While the pair’s love ultimately dies out, director Rita Azevedo Gomes translates their coming-of-age challenges and familial pressures through constant visual subtlety, nuanced performances, and revelations of love at its bleakest. It is a slickly grim, borderline noir exploration of childhood innocence, the passage of time, and what the heart yearns for most.
Gomes’s strength in Fragile is her knack for silence and long-winded shots. With love being a significant component or genre of mainstream film discourses, it is easy to overuse formulas or get too sentimental in showcase (eg., love is told in cheesy dialogue, not shown through loving expressions). Gomes exemplifies the opposite; viewers must take in every change in face or body made available, forcing them to watch and analyze everything. This intellectualizes the topic, creating a dissociative connection between the characters and events. Of course, Gomes’s bold strategy does not always simmer. As the film runs for an hour and a half, too many shots drag out, and there is too much silence to instill grave awe consistently. These moments water down the film’s impact and disrupt its otherwise perplexing angling of romance, making it feel hollow and forced at times. Nevertheless, Fragile as the World mostly shines in its distant observation of love as tragic, redefining romance as told in film with the utmost subtlety and emotional understanding.
Fragile as the World
2001
dir. Rita Azevedo Gomes
90 min.
Screens Saturday, 9/30, 7:00pm @ Harvard Film Archive
Part of the continuing series: Música de Câmara: The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes
