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THE NEW BRAZILIAN CINEMA
the critical way the conflicts between love and money, marriage and
business, in the bourgeois society of the nineteenth century are displayed.
Furthermore, certain literary marks of enunciation are
transposed to the screen, involving Queiroz’s ironic strategies in
the deployment of the plot. If we compare the two narratives, considering
both the factual aspects of the story and the strategies of
irony and humour employed, we may perceive that Ratton’s film
contains much more ambiguity and subtlety than the novel. This is
because he explores and intensifies the irony which is apparent in
a less obvious form in Queiroz’s late production, which I called,
earlier in this chapter, ‘the exploration of doubt and uncertainty’.
Indeed, the book Alves & Cia., while focusing on the issue of
adultery, does not do so in the same way as the novel O primo
Basílio, for example, whose tone is given by what Machado de Assis
called the ‘minute, almost technical description of adulterous
relations’; 4 instead, adultery is depicted through an ingenious play
of deceptions. Even though Ludovina’s act of infidelity is explicit,
since the narrator’s omniscient voice leads to this certainty, the
plot deploys an intricate play of contradictions involving all the
characters. If, on the one hand, they are moved by self-interest
and self-advancement as they try to dismiss the proofs of adultery
and convince us to the contrary, on the other hand, the narrator
disavows them through humour and irony. Thus certainty is not
given directly but is mediated by artifice and contradiction.
In the case of the film Amor & Cia., those who fall into the trap
of contradiction are not only the characters, but also the audience.
This is because the ‘eye’ of the camera shuffles the points-ofview
and the references, choosing a paradoxical and elliptical
focus on the events. It may be said that Eça de Queiroz’s irony in
the novel has the function of unmasking, between the lines, what
the characters try to falsify in the story, while Ratton’s irony has the
role of maintaining the said and the unsaid, the seen and the
unseen, in a state of tension and mobility. This kind of irony fits
into the category described by Linda Hutcheon as ‘inclusive’, that
takes place simultaneously in conjunction and disjunction
between the this and the that; when confronted with the choice
between two mutually exclusive things, one chooses both of them,
which means in the end that one chooses neither. 5 On this point,
I also see in the film a concealed, almost underground, dialogue
with Machado de Assis’ novel Dom Casmurro. Indeed, some echoes
of the artifices of ambiguity used by the nineteenth century