/ARTS WEEKLY/FILM-BRAZIL: Life of German Communist Jew Set to Become a Sensation

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 7 2004 (IPS) - ‘Olga’, based on the life of a German Jew who was the bodyguard and lover of Brazilian Communist leader Luiz Carlos Prestes, looks set to become this year’s movie sensation in Brazil.

The film, which was released Aug. 20 in 260 theatres across Brazil – a privilege generally only granted to Hollywood superproductions – – expects to draw millions of viewers, a goal that will be helped by massive publicity in the media.

The production and publicity cost 12 million reals (around four million dollars), a sizeable budget by Brazilian standards.

Director Jayme Monjardim is making his debut in cinema with ‘Olga’, although he has a long career in TV, having directed popular soap operas like ‘Pantanal’ and ‘The Clone’.

In pre-release screenings, ‘Olga’ was met with loud applause.

But it has also received criticism, much of which has to do with the director’s past, from commentators saying the film is basically a soap opera brought to the big screen, a melodrama that relies too heavily on close-ups and loud, emotional music.

Critics also complain that it focuses on the love story between the main characters while sacrificing the historical and political context in which the events took place. There have also been unfavourable comparisons with the book on which the movie is based.

The film is another example of events or figures from Brazil’s recent history that journalists have salvaged from obscurity in popular, widely-read books that have then been brought to audiences in movie theatres.

In this case, the source was the bestseller ‘Olga’ by reporter Fernando Morais – a biography of Olga Benario, a German Communist Jew who came to Brazil in 1935, accompanying Prestes, the legendary leader of Brazil’s Communist Party, as one of his bodyguards.

A failed military insurrection and disastrous popular uprising by communists and other leftists in November 1935 sealed Benario’s fate. She was arrested several months later by a police woman whose superior was a Nazi sympathiser. Brazil was ruled at the time by the dictatorial government of President Getulio Vargas (1930-1945).

Benario was deported to Adolph Hitler’s Germany in 1936. She was pregnant with Prestes’ daughter, who was born in a concentration camp. In 1942, at the age of 33, Olga was killed in a gas chamber along with 199 other women.

The tragic story proved to be a tear-jerker as expected, in the pre- release showings.

The love story between Benario and Prestes was the top priority for Monjardim, who said he mainly wanted to bring to life “the emotions” of important figures in Brazilian history. “It is the love letters between them that are melodramatic,” said the director in his own defence.

But his concentration on the love story leaves little room for the political situation in the 1930s, when Brazil was living under a dictatorship and undergoing intense changes, and for Prestes himself.

Morais said he was satisfied with the way his book was carried to the big screen, but said entire chapters were summed up in just a few phrases uttered by the cast.

More than 600,000 copies – a major success for a political biography – were sold of his book, which was first printed in 1985.

Another biography written by Morais, ‘Cható, the King of Brazil’, on Assis Chateaubriand, the business tycoon who headed the country’s first media empire, is also being made into a film, but the process has been a troubled one.

The production of ‘Cható’ stalled for several years due to an accusation of diversion of public funds, but is scheduled to be completed by year- end.

‘Dirty Hearts’ is another of Morais’s books, whose rights have also been purchased for the production of a film.

The book tells the story of Japanese immigrants who refused to admit that Japan was defeated in World War II and created a secret fundamentalist organisation that killed dozens of makegumi (defeat faction) immigrants, who were dubbed “dirty hearts” by the Shindo militants and sentenced to death for believing the truth.

Like Morais, many other journalists have dedicated themselves to investigating periods of Brazilian history or writing biographies that in some cases have served as the basis for screenplays.

Another example is Ruy Castro, the author of ‘The Pornographic Angel’, the life story of one of Brazil’s most prominent playwrights, Nelson Rodrigues. A film will also be made of ‘Solitary Star’, his biography of legendary Brazilian footballer Garrincha, the hero of the 1958 and 1962 world cups in Sweden and Chile, respectively.