Sentimental Education (2013) - full transcript

Áurea is a sentimental older woman, who befriends teenager Áureo. They like each other, so she talks to him about herself, her spirituality, mysticism and existence itself. They become inseparable, so his jealous mother confronts her.

Sentimental Education

What is your name?

?ureo.

?ureo.

Yes.

And yours?

?urea.

There is just one letter of
difference.

Good.

Very good.

I saw you.



I saw that you looked at me.

As the Moon looked at Endymion.

Who?

Endymion.

Endymion.

The young shepard of a rare
beauty...

that, one day after a hunting,

went to a cave to rest.

He slept there.

The Moon,

observer and contemplative goddess
of androgynous nature,

fell in love with him...

and took advantage of his sleep
to kiss him.

The love between a goddess and a
mortal is forbidden.



The beautiful Endymion was made imortal
by Zeus,

but he was imprisoned in an
endless sleep.

Eternal sleep.

Because he dared to desire the love
of a goddess.

Every night, however,

the Moon,

interpreter between mortals
and immortals,

went down from the sky...

to contemplate her lover Endymion.

You took long to leave the pool.

Wasn't the water cold?

Very cold.

Do you like cold water?

Not always.

So why did you take so long to leave
the water?

My dick was hard.

In front of us there is the infinity.

The life is there.

Here is a long paroxysm...

and a short day.

A love is paid with another love.

No. It is not that way.

A love...

by another love...

vanishes.

Porcelain. French.

18th century.

18th century.

Porcelain.

Porcelain.

French.

I write with the left hand.

For me...

the left hand has primacy over
the right hand.

After my mother death...

I haven't written anymore.

I don't know.

I don't know what it was.

The will disappeared.

I lost my anger.

First comes the anger...

that unfolds in hatred...

that unfolds in delirium.

And in a final blow...

it overflows into madness.

Madness.

Anger.

Did you have anger of your mother?

A lot.

That's why I used to write.

I would like to die early,
very young.

This is the second novel I have written.

The last one.

Have you written two books?

Two novels.

I have written some essays,

studies.

I have made a poem.

I've never published anything...

and I will not.

I don't want it.

It is past.

This book...

is a novel...

that I haven't finished.

It was the destiny who didn't want
me to finish it.

It is a interpretation of some Brazilian
poets and artists from 19th century.

Poets that died very young.

Before 25 years old.

As if poetry and talent were a curse.

I would like to know...

some of these poets.

Phanthom poets.

Mystic spectres.

Some of them, phantoms of camphor.

The phantom,

the phantom motif,

goes through all history of erotism...

since Antiquity.

Laurindo Rabelo,

Junqueira Freire, ?lvares de Azevedo,
Casemiro de Abreu,

Franco S?.

And the most unfortunately famous of
them all: Castro Alves.

Cases such as...

Noel Rosa.

There are others.

Even younger and obscurer.

I didn't study them.

I didn't have time.

They died early.

They didn't have time.

No,

they didn't have time.

The tyranny of political economy paved
the human heart.

There is no more place for sensibility.

Nowadays...

the obscene is the sensibility.

There are people very bad informed about
the human heart.

It's a special text...

written in 1740.

Its singularity consists in having been
published anonymously by the author...

in order to draw attention to the
importance of the original...

by the same author.

He summarized the text...

in order to make it more accessible to...

his few readers.

For him...

the human nature,

Man...

is...

habit,

resemblance,

contiguity,

cause.

Habit:

it is not reason that conducts life,

but habit.

The reasons by why the body acts
are unknown.

Resemblance:

when we see the portrait...

we think about the portrayed.

Contiguity:

speaking about Saint Denis...

happens naturally in Paris.

Cause:

When we think about the son...

we can transfer our thoughts...

to the father.

The interior diversity...

is the source of enrichment.

Philology doesn't have only erudites
among its members.

There are in this field imaginative
men too.

Sometimes men with a lot of
imagination.

What to me is a virtue.

One of them proposes that the five
vowels...

are the language of laugh.

Man laughs in A.

Woman laughs in E.

The devout laughs in I.

The peasant laughs in O.

And finally the old ladies
laughs in U.

Expanding the method, in 1662,

the Italian astrologer
Abbott Damascene...

said that the doctor could distinguish
the temperament of his patients...

by touching their bodies.

If they laughed in A...

they were phlegmatic.

If they laughed in E...

they were bilious.

If they laughed in I...

they were melancholic.

If they laughed in O...

they were sanguine.

And if they laughed in U...

they were something that he didn't define.

He left blank.

In order to each doctor to
understand it in his own way.

Very good.

The ancient world is out of the ordinary.

It is my age.

It was born to live long...

as its great-grandparents did,

the prediluvian chelonians.

Nowadays men work seriously...

to live as much as...

or more...

than a turtle.

Living two...

three...

four...

five times...

more than a turtle.

And then...

finally...

die.

Curious mirror.

Ironic life, isn't it?

Those who know the animals...

insist that they have...

intelligence and language.

It is old.

Plato,

Flavius Josephus,

Saint Basil...

believed in it.

Saint Basil even wrote...

that in Paradise the animals speak
among themselves...

and understand each other...

in a reasonable way.

An Italian sage, the jesuit Mario Bettinus,

author of a pastoral book called Rubenus,

was the first author who translated
to human language...

the song of the nightingale.

He said that it should be
pronounciated in...

the Italian language.

A film.

A photographic film.

This has an archaeological value today.

It will be soon in the museum of lost
sensibilities.

Do you like cinema?

I like it.

Very much.

I have gone to the cinema all my life.

When I was young I have attended what
in that time was called Cineclub.

It passed.

The film passed.

The Cineclub closed.

I have kept with me this footage,

this piece of film,

as a presentiment.

A dear memory.

Transparent.

Crossed by the light...

that projects it.

In that long list of poets who
died young...

there is a singer...

called Vassourinha.

Do you know him?

No.

He died when he was 19 years old...

from a terrible disease...

in the bones.

Listen to it.

It is modern.

It anticipates.

His voice is made of many voices.

He painted...

with the voice.

I have suffered from a kidney
inflammation.

I have been two days in a coma.

I had something like a Kekul?'s dream.

I saw a snake biting its own tail.

I never felt so good...

than when I thought I was going to die.

My life has always been sad.

One image tortures me.

It persecutes me.

During all my life, always.

A wound that didn't create a scab.

It didn't healed.

My father was a free thinker,

a methodic man,

a liberal.

He wanted to lead to its ultimate
consequences...

the task of investigating himself,

cutting the human roots...

from the mineral,

vegetable,

and animal kingdom.

Noble task.

And difficult.

He distanciated himself from
people who,

for laziness and fear of the others,

behave according to the conventions...

and follow the herd's fashion.

One holiday,

a rainy day,

in afternoon,

a quiet afternoon,

too quiet,

he...

he asphyxiated himself with gas...

in the kitchen oven.

In the deep of his relationship...

there was a mistake,

something not said.

It just came into light,

his relationship broke.

What came into light was part of that
shadow...

that reigns in the center
of each one of us.

An uncanny feeling,

a dryness in the heart.

When we are afraid
of being afraid,

we do scary things.

He left me and my mother.

I have never understood that.

Even today...

I don't understand.

But depriving...

is a form of possessing.

Some years later my mother died.

I faced the world.

Your mother was a writer.

No, she wasn't a writer.

But she used to write.

She was a PhD in philosophy.

She never taught classes.

She didn't want to!

She didn't feel attracted to it,
she didn't like it!

She thought that popularity was an
insult.

She only liked to read.

She loved to read.

She read all the time.

She took notes by hand...

usually in the book itself.

And she breathed with it.

She read unceasingly.

The place she kept her books
and notes...

was sacred for her.

She took more care of it...

than of anything else in the world.

She said to me more than one time:

living without philosophy...

is living with the eyes shut.

She used to interrogate some
pieces of paper over months.

She was not a cold woman,

on the contrary.

Sometimes,

she showed great energy...

and warmth.

She thought she was too subtle,

too smart, too perverse...

to be accepted.

She died reading.

Three years after my father's death.

Ancient forces.

Another world.

Contemplation...

is participation.

The sensible soul is...

like Jacob's ladder.

It wants...

knowledge.

Reading just for the love
of reading...

is an incomprehensible thing,

an unacceptable thing...

to the world whose
main features are

the practical interests.

After my parent's death,

I found myself alone.

I needed a lot of illusions...

to bear life's dark times,

the days when everything haunts us,

gloomy and sad.

I have written a poem during some years.

I would not call it an
epic of the spirit,

but almost.

The adventures of the soul,

the stellar spaces,

and in the intimate abyss.

It was something like Primero Sue?o,

but more modest than the Mexican
monk's one.

Much more.

But, nonetheless,

it's a minucious work...

of sounds and rhythms.

No one writes like that.

No one.

Especially those men poets...

who rule nowadays.

I wanted to save from wreck some
freedom...

of the feminine spirit.

My breathing was my seismograph,

seismograph of my unconscious.

I did it my way...

a pyramidal shadow.

I impose the freedom on my soul.

It's a dream of a dream.

The poem finishes in the fall,

in the encounter with the abyss,

the void...

and the consciousness of nothing.

This piece of organized matter that
is called I...

deteriorating,

decaying...

until falling...

and getting lost in the infinity
of the universe.

A manual of our cultural twilight.

I love you.

"Moon" means...

the luminous,

the one which expands its light
to everyone,

which illuminates with its rays.

The Moon,

the other celestial Earth,

receives the sunlight...

and reflects on Earth.

The moon's sexual nature is dubious,

androgynous.

Masculine and feminine at the
same time.

Feminine in relation to the Sun,

Masculine in relation to the Earth,

but especially feminine.

It is just secondarily masculine.

It represents the interpreter
between...

immortal

and mortal.

May I come in?

Come in.

I don't want you denying it.

I just want to tell you who is
my son...

and who we are.

We are an uncommon family.

- There is nothing immoral
in our friendship.

Friendship?

Yes.

A friendship.

How many heart strings does a hand
of a friend know to vibrate?

Let aside this teacher's prudence.

You are cynical.

You don't know anything.

I will tell you who is my son...

and who we are.

Everything you could say to my son,

everything you could do to him,

I already said...

...and did.

We had a period of pleasures...

since he was a baby.

I prepared him.

Kiss,

cuddle,

penetration.

I taught him everything.

He used to come with me.

If you like I could give you the details.
Scandalous secret.

Has he ever spoken about his sister?

No.

He had one sister.

She died.

He never spoke about it.

How did she die?

She killed herself.

She committed suicide.

She jumped from the terrace
of a skyscraper.

She was one year older than him.

She was in love with him.

She killed herself because of the love
with her brother.

Carnal love.

But they...

...they were lovers since childhood.

They drank,

smoked, spoke obscenities.

They took their clothes off
to sleep together...

and when, inebriated,
they indulged in all manner of things.

Drunk, naked,

they pissed all the house.

And they had orgies with the
70 years old maid.

They liked it. They said that
the senile sex was good.

One night, they went out.

He was dressed as a woman
and she was dressed as a man...

to prostitute themselves.

When their father died in a car
accident...

they gave a party in a friend's house.

It was more than a party...

because, when the volcano vomits,

the falling lava devours everything
it finds.

The bacchanal lasts more than one week...
- Don't say anything more!

Shut up!

When something stinks,
keep your nose clean.

You are an imposter.

I'm the witness of a farce!

Even masked,

even hidden,

what you didn't say appears entirely.

The lips say,

the heart unsays.

Orgy,

incest,

fellation,

troilism,

everything goes through the pornographic,

depraved,

puerile,

ignorant mind!

I'm going to call an ambulance!

You have to be hospitalized!

Seducer! Pervert!

Cougar! Pornographic!

Circuscene

Camera!

Two!

Cut!

Has it hurt?
- No, no.

It is crooked.
- It isn't working because here...

No, no. It was great.
It was really well. This is enough.

Accelerate...

Now it sets fire: the hand!

Cut!

Did it hurt?

The camera roll is the 13, 15, 1: first!

Make silence with the sweeper, people!
We are filming!

Camera!

The sweeper's noise!
Vassourinha!

So, pay attention!
Sound!

Is the sound OK?
- 14, 1, first!

Camera!

I say action.

Cut!

It's fine.

Is there any problem, Paulo?

Cut.

Fuck! I was mad!

I've started.
- Go!

Go back. Roll 20, 11, B, 5, second.

Camera!

And... click!

Cut, thank you.

Perfect!

Clapper!

Go, go fast!

Go, you can come!

Cut! Great, thanks!

Let's go to another film sequence.

The battery will run out in the middle
of the shot. There will be a problem.

Great!

Go!

Great!

It is recording!

The scene entrance with echo
was spectacular!

Long days and nights
we strained at the oars

while the white whale swam
freely on, widening the water...

Now it sets fire! The hand!

Cut!

No, no, no. It was great!

This is good enough!

Good!

Cut!
- Clapper!

Good!