“I’m not much of a person,” says Macabea, one of the great unloved lovables and the star, if that’s the word, of Suzana Amaral’s 1985 debut feature, A Hora da Estrela (Hour of the Star). A significant adaptation of the novel by fellow Brazilian Clarice Lispector, it’s a film that has delighted and frustrated viewers. Many people, award committees especially, were taken with the tale of a simple, poor, plodding soul from the North barely capable of her job as a secretary or of small talk with her dumb boyfriend. With a face only a mother could love (which is tough for an orphan), she has the idiosyncrasies of an awkward junior high student. She dresses for the day under her bedcovers, away from her roommates’ eyes. At work she wipes her runny nose on her dress, breaking for the same lunch every day: hot dogs. For days off, she rides the subways for fun.

These idiosyncrasies won’t much charm those impatient with the film’s politics—class, racial, rural/urban—which are tame for a national cinema forged in the furnaces of Cinema Novo. Although she suffers at the hands of her dead-end boyfriend and from her naiveté, Macabea doesn’t achieve a level of increased consciousness, much less participate in a revolt, get assaulted by police thugs, or seduce and mock a landowner. Yet she’s easily a poster victim for passivity and self-delusion within societal structures and gender relations: distraught after her boyfriend dumps her (“You’re a hair in my soup!” he proclaims), she visits her local causal nexus, the same fortune teller who told her office friend to steal her dope boyfriend and who plants an even worse fantasy.

I don’t find either ideology—“international acclaim” or underclass consciousness—particularly compelling, because they both lose what remains bizarre about Macabea. She is so concertedly an empty vessel that one becomes suspicious, and one suspects the laying of a minefield of projection. One group sees a young woman with an appealingly harmless, slightly off world of a simple mind, with “finely chosen details” and a satisfying tragic end. Another with its own self-described sensitivity reveals itself to be blind to Macabea’s seemingly voided point of view, the one bit of radicalism that remains.

In the original novel, a male narrator wonders aloud about how to portray Macabea (and most dramatically, what to convey of her end). Amaral’s adaptation is a model one for not duplicating but refiguring this structure: the open-endedness introduced by the novel’s reflexivity lives on in the movie through Macabea’s blankness and yet identifiable foreignness, which seem to oscillate the more one contemplates her character. “I’m not much of a person. I’m not used to it,” continues Macabea. “Am I what I am?” This isn’t just nightmare-date mushmouth, and it resists the status of a mission statement by the reality of Macabea’s asocial confusion and disconnect. She is someone who bolts aspirins for mysterious pains that anyone can identify as lovesickness, and who at times seems a challenging borderline test case for Asperger diagnosis, but when the moment comes, she can and does say “Go away” to her man. The real question about her character is the challenge to the viewer: There’s something there, but how far will we go to find it?
—NICOLAS RAPOLD