Kritiken (1)
Sartre's cliché that hell is other people is fully valid - hell is indeed not a place, just as death has no topos: it is in music, words, looks, and the objective of the camera. And death is in the soul instead of the "sun in the soul," the sun of beauty, the Brazilian sun, the sun of the Tropic of Capricorn, the state of Minas Gerais. There is something mythological about the theme, in which a family of decaying former aristocracy or high bourgeoisie closes itself in its isolated, nostalgically wallpapered Petri dish and is observed from the outside with an artistic microscope, just as it is threatened from the outside by the draft of modernity. The biggest contribution of this film lies in two things: firstly, this draft does not represent any simplified agitational symbol, but a character equally hysterical and in its defiant energy almost equally feeble-minded, which means that senseless conjectures, accusations, jealousies, envies, illusions, and chimeras do not sound out, as if there were a simple way out in the right direction. Therefore, secondly, the film is at its strongest when it leaves that external appearance and dives inside its Petri dish - death as a depth permeates the whole mise-en-scène, framing, and a dramatically sweet neo-romantic musical underscore.
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