/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/TELEVISION-BRAZIL: Soap Opera a Unique Mix of Cloning and Islam

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 5 2002 (IPS) - A new soap opera from Brazil’s giant television Globo network, “O Clone” (The Clone), focuses on two hot issues, cloning and Islam, and has entered a decisive chapter in the story at home, while beginning an early career abroad.

Telemundo, the Spanish-language television channel that targets the Latino population in the United States, began showing this Brazilian soap opera in mid-January, the first to premier abroad dubbed in another language – Spanish in this case – before the series has come to an end in Brazil.

“The Clone” can also be considered Brazil’s first soap to be truly international in that it involves issues with global repercussions and serves to contrast two countries, Brazil and Morocco, and their respective cultures. It is this aspect that favours the show’s conquest of foreign audiences.

The story begins 20 years after a Brazilian scientist, known as Albieri and played by Juca de Oliveira, has created a human clone.

Albieri creates a clone in part driven by the desire to replace a young man who was killed in an accident, and in part out of carelessness, because it occurs before he makes a clear decision about whether he will attempt it.

The clone is created using cells from Lucas, the dead youth’s twin brother. The artificial insemination of a woman and mix-up of laboratory material leads to the birth of the clone, named Leo.

The woman received the genetic material prepared by Albieri instead of the intended sperm sample.

The scientist uses several schemes to hide the fact that Leo is a clone, but after 20 years it becomes impossible to keep his origins a secret.

Lucas and his clone Leo are played by Murilo Benicio, who is a well-known soap opera actor in Brazil and appeared in the U.S.- made film “Woman on Top” alongside Spanish actress Penélope Cruz.

The soap opera, which began showing in Brazil last October, drew top viewing audiences the third week of January because the episode featured the reappearance of the young clone who, according to the story, had disappeared for 15 years.

Also favouring a large audience is the fact that much of the story takes place in Morocco, which allows the programme to portray the cultural rules of the Muslim world and contrast them with Brazilian culture, based on family and trade relations between the two countries.

Interest in Islam has grown a great deal since the Sep 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, but that is not what prompted the Globo network or the soap opera’s author, Gloria Pérez, to choose the Muslim theme.

That sort of decision is taken many months, even a year before the soap opera appears on television because preparation and filming of the numerous episodes, which are broadcast over period of at least six months, require a great deal of time, says the network.

But the soap opera has been the target of criticism, particularly from Muslims in Brazil, who denounce the show’s caricatured portrayal of Islam and of Moroccan culture.

However, Pérez says the debate she had hoped to trigger was the one about cloning.

The story, from the scientific standpoint, is pure fiction. It is impossible that an isolated researcher 20 years ago, working in a modest laboratory in a country without major scientific advances, could clone a human being.

“It is absurd” that this matter is being handled with such levity, stated Volnei Garrafa, president of the Brazilian Bio-Ethics Society and professor at the University of Brasilia.

Garrafa said in a conversation with IPS that the soap opera presents a distorted picture of science and feeds false expectations.

Garrafa cited the example of a colleague, a university professor with a doctorate in a scientific field, who asked him if cloning might not be an alternative for dealing with his infertility problem.

But the soap opera does not seem very concerned about scientific and ethical questions, as its main objective is to portray the legal questions raised by cloning – though always from the basis of fiction.

In upcoming episodes, the reappearance of Leo will trigger a lawsuit and questions about who the clone is legally, because genetically he is Lucas, though 20 years younger. Is Leo his twin brother? Does he have the same rights as Lucas? Who is his legal father?

All of these questions are already being asked by jurists as they prepare for the real-life possibility of human cloning.

The author of “The Clone” is repeating, but in different terms, the argument from one of her past soap operas, from the 1980s, in which a young women “rents” her uterus for the gestation of a another woman’s child, and then fights a legal battle for parental rights against the couple who hired her “services.”

And, just as occurred in that soap opera, the fictional court ruling, this time about Leo’s rights as a clone, will be issued by a real-life judge, Ana María Scarpezini, of Sao Paulo.

With “O Clone” the Globo network, whose soap opera exports represent an increasingly important source of revenues for the company, is now internationalising its programmes’ themes.

In the past, Brazil’s soap operas included images and scenes filmed abroad, but they tended to be brief episodes in which the characters were travelling, or involved secondary action. But this time Fez, a Moroccan city, is ever-present in the programme and the central themes are not at all limited to Brazilian reality.