Gil, Let’s Explode São Paulo has a fantastic opening, one of the best of any documentary I’ve seen this year.
For almost ten minutes, middle-aged Brazilian Gildeane Leonina – ‘Gil’ – is sitting on the step of an outdoor laundry area at the back of a house (this “liminal and symbolic space in the architecture of the Brazilian home,” as one Portuguese reviewer put it), talking to the camera of Maria Clara Escobar (Desterro, 2020).
She is shot in a single take, the camera using the washing machine behind her almost like a portrait frame, while she speaks haltingly, but precisely, searching for just the right words, which sometimes do, sometimes don’t appear, at times choking up, at other times laughing wearily, as she drifts between optimism and pessimism, between the broken dreams of her past and the frightening emptiness of her future, between the mask she, as a cleaner, is forced to present to the outside world, and her true self as a singer in the depths of her being, which she has never been able to share with society. “I think,” she sighs, “when we have a life, it’s hard to want another life.”
Gil draws us in without any need for a camera zoom, quietly guiding us through a lifetime of dreams which never materialised, pragmatic pride in survival, and an undying glimmer of hope – accompanied by the fear her dream might one day actually come true. Because, what if it turns out that it isn’t all she hopes it will be?
This scene only gets better as the film progresses. Because the next person we see, I struggled to recognise her as the same woman. This time, Gil’s not at work. Instead, she is wearing a loose-fitting printed shirt and short colourful trousers. She isn’t quietly searching for words, but presenting herself proudly and loudly to the camera as not only a cleaner, but a singer, an epileptic and depressed person, and a “dyke” (the translation given in the English subtitles for her Portuguese self-description).
But it really is the same person – my temporary confusion is a striking confirmation of how well people can hide their true selves and present a safer, more acceptable version to the world.
And there’s another way in which this opening scene acquires deeper meaning later on. Maria, the director and interviewer, who seems like a friend, and who later also appears from behind the camera, is also Gil’s employer: it’s probably her washing machine Gil was sitting in front of. And although they are close enough for Gil to share her hopes and dreams with Maria, the standard power imbalance between filmer and filmed of course gets exacerbated when they are also employer and employee. As Gil remarks sharply at one point: “If I become successful, who will dust your house? You yourself, crying, regretting having encouraged me?”
The issue is not discussed directly, which raised some eyebrows in the Brazilian reviews I read, but then again this is not a conventional documentary. And given the role Gil’s impoverished situation plays in her inability to follow her dreams, no viewer can avoid the class factor.
As 47-year-old Susan Boyle says, during her breakthrough performance on Britain’s Got Talent (which Gil listens to, clutching the sound box as if it were a stuffed toy), when asked why she never tried professional singing before, and if that’s what she had really wanted all this time: “I haven’t been given the chance before. But here’s hoping it’ll change.”
What a coincidence!, the reader may think at this point. Maria being there to film while Gil was listening to Boyle – it’s almost too perfect to be true! Well, quite.
Of course this was a set-up. This film is quite openly full of them. It even feels too simplistic to call the film a ‘hybrid’ – although it is – because it’s such a mishmash of styles and levels. Even the scenes in which Gil and Susan discuss how to enact her dreamt-of career (which we will see unfold, through karaoke, a record deal, and a rock concert where the crowd enthusiastically sings along to her hit lyrics) could very well have been semi-scripted themselves.
After all, at the Olhar de Cinema festival in Curitiba, Maria Clara Escobar didn’t just win Best Director in the Brazilian Competition, Gil won ‘Best Performance’.
Is Maria using Gil for her film? Is Gil using Maria for her big break? I think the film is transparent enough about what it is doing to allow the audience to decide for themselves. And although it’s obvious that the big rock concert scene was staged, and the crowd was instructed to sing along with the lyrics, that doesn’t mean Gil didn’t, finally, sing for an audience. An audience which now also includes us.
And this is exactly where the documentary reality of this mishmash of a hybrid resides, because an insight remains an insight, a poem remains a poem, a joke remains a joke and a song remains a song – regardless of whether the context is documentary or fictional. Whatever you call this film, in whichever genre you place it, one thing is certain: Gil really did sing.
Brazil, Portugal, 2025, 98 minutes
Director Maria Clara Escobar
Production Filmes de Abril, Ponta de Lança, Terratreme
Producers Paula Pripas, Maria Clara Escobar, João Matos
International sales Vitrine Filmes
Script Maria Clara Escobar, Gildeane Leonina
Cinematography Wilssa Esser, Bruno Risas
Editing Luisa Lanna, Ian Capillé, Maria Clara Escobar, Joana Luz
Sound design Nicolau Domingues
Sound Fernanda Porto, Paula Pripas, Zé Barrichello, Raul Arthuso, Vanessa Silva, Diana Ragnole, Ana Chiossi
With Gildeane Leonina, Ivaneide Cavalaro (Dedê), Gilda Nomacce, Maria Clara Escobar, Paula Pripas
