Scratched
Brazil, 2010
Directed by: Gustavo Pizzi
Production: Gustavo Pizzi and Cavi Borges
Screenplay: Gustavo Pizzi and Karine Teles
Edition: Paulo Camacho
by Ricardo P Nunes
In one of the speeches of the main character of Riscado (Brasil, 2010), Bianca mentions some qualities that she would like a film about her to possess, among them “honesty and delicacy”. Bianca, alter ego of the actress who plays her, Karine Teles, is not just lip-service, as they say. With honesty and lightness, director Gustavo Pizzi knew how to fill the film, but it is its protagonist who gives it a face and a verbal expression of astonishing spontaneity.
Teles: The voice of sincerity
The film brings a script within another script, the real; but that fictional script that the characters are plotting is gradually setting up the drama of someone that everyone somehow can recognize in life and with whom we can identify. Living on odds and ends to pay the rent, Bianca dreams of a great movie for her career; interested in the blunt way in which she reveals her quest during selection tests for a talent bank, an international producer wants to turn her story into the script of a film that, in turn, as in the tale of two men who dream of One Thousand and One Nights, will be the very realization of the dream she has been looking for since the beginning. Something autobiographical in the life of actress Karine Teles, who also writes the script, she knew that as little emotional as possible would be the best way to project the drama of her own role.
It is, however, a contained film, which its director manages to compensate with different stocks and camera formats. Another mitigation of their constricted environment is the ubiquity of shattered dreams that so afflict humanity.
dream within another dream
Going back to the beginning, I forgot to remember that honest reality can even turn out to be, that the display of facts in itself is not a matter of good or evil; but delicate, it will depend on which side you look at. The subtlety with which the film tries to conduct itself may have no other end than not being carried away by the merely brutal. It seems that, because we never know clearly what really defines our destiny, whether luck, talent, money, chance, until we get an answer, what awaits us is the resigned dignity of trying to rehearse a smile so that we don't do badly in the scene from the movie in which we are just extras.
