Limite
About Limite
A man and two women stop rowing and let a small boat drift. In memory, one woman has escaped prison and is still being hunted. The other has left a cold marriage to an alcoholic pianist. The man, a widower, tells of loving a married woman, then learning at his wife's grave, from her husband, that the woman had leprosy. A storm breaks the boat. One woman is left holding the wreckage.
Cast & crew
More about Limite
Mário Peixoto wrote, directed, edited, and produced his only finished feature, with Edgar Brasil as cameraman. Shot in 1930 on the coast at Mangaratiba, where a cousin had a farm. Invited premiere at the Cinema Capitólio in Cinelândia, Rio de Janeiro, on May 17, 1931. The audience was cold. Silent, with Portuguese intertitles. Brazilian sources also credit Cinédia.
Themes
Making
Peixoto paid for the shoot with family money and did not complete another feature.
Look
Edgar Brasil photographed the boat, the shoreline, and the flashbacks. Peixoto cut the film.
Preservation
By 1959 the only nitrate print could no longer be projected. In 1966 police of the military government seized it, with Soviet films, from the Faculdade Nacional de Filosofia. Pereira de Mello got it back the same year. Frame-by-frame photographic restoration finished in 1978. One scene was gone and is replaced by an intertitle. The Mário Peixoto Archives and the Cinemateca Brasileira prepared the version shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on November 17, 2010.
Notes
- In Paris in August 1929 Peixoto saw an André Kertész photograph of handcuffed male hands around a woman's neck. The handcuff image in the film restages that picture.
- Olga Breno and Taciana Rey play the women. Raul Schnoor plays the man. Peixoto himself appears as a man in a cemetery. Carmen Santos and Brutus Pedreira are also in the cast.
- Ruy Costa and Brutus Pedreira are credited as co-directors in Brazilian listings.
Also available
- Criterion Collection, Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project (2017 DVD and Blu-ray)