Invisible Life Parent Guide

Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and her sister Guida (Julia Stockler) have always been close. Coming of age in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1950s, they find themselves pulled down different paths: Guida runs off to Greece with a sailor, and Eurídice marries and continues to practice piano so she can apply to a musical conservatory in Austria. When Guida returns home pregnant, having left her scoundrel of a husband, her father (Antônio Fonseca) berates her and tells her never to come back. But Eurídice never gave up, and continues to look for her sister, never imagining that she has returned to Rio…

This stamps a lot of “foreign film bingo” squares: excessive sexual content, long runtime, and tragic character studies. It also doesn’t come with an English dub track (at least not on Amazon Prime, where I watched it), so unless you’re fluent in Portuguese, you’re going to have to deal with subtitles. I don’t mind them, but I know that’s a deal-breaker for some people.

Speaking of deal-breakers, this movie has a big one: the semi-constant sexual misadventures of the leads. If it were constrained to dialogue, it would be a lot more manageable, but I saw a lot more of the leads (and their partners) than I had any interest in seeing. Full-frontal male nudity is relatively uncommon in American films (outside of comedies), but it’s treated nonchalantly in many foreign films. Unless you’re teaching some bizarre sex-ed class, Invisible Life probably isn’t a great choice for family viewing.

The explicit sexual content is doubly unfortunate because the film is otherwise quite touching. Relationships between characters are complex and malleable and it’s very interesting to watch them develop. Carol Duarte and Julia Stockler are both superb, which only adds to the personal tragedy of their characters. The long, slow shots make this feel almost like a play – as does the runtime, which clocks in well over two hours.

This isn’t going to revolutionize your opinions about foreign films, but if that’s a genre you enjoy, and you’re comfortable with a higher-than-average number of graphic sex scenes, then you could do worse. At least Invisible Life has some genuinely thought-provoking and emotionally challenging themes, so it isn’t just Brazilian pay-per-view nudity. It’s emotionally fraught nudity - you know, the depressing kind.