Outside event: O Amor Natural

O Amor Natural (1996) directed by Heddy Honigmann

I assumed a documentary revolving around a book of erotic poems was bound to have some redeeming qualities, but O Amor Natural was even better than I hoped.

The film is a series of interview with elderly Brazilians, who are asked to read poems from a posthumously published book by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and talk about the poet and the work. The poems seem to invariably lead to reminiscences of their own sexual pasts, and so the film becomes not only a profile of the poet, but an exploration of sexuality through the eyes of people well-passed their sexual prime.

There are so many really great characters in the documentary, and I laughed out loud more than once at some of the conversations – like the man with a variety of stories of former sexual exploits who kept emphasizing that his age was 85 “and a half,” or the woman who thought Drummond made up “oris” as a surname for the word “clit.” But between the funny and sometimes awkward conversations is a look at sexuality that you don’t often see – octogenarians talking candidly and nostalgically about their past sexual experiences –not typically something that I hear or even think about. As my friend who went to the screening with me said,”It really made me think about sex!”

The film is very engaging, partly because the interviews are so intimate and personal. In an online interview with Honigmann, she talks about how some filmmakers are terrible listeners, and just talk right over people in an effort to get to their next question. Clearly this is not her style, because most of the interviews are barely cut, just rolling straight through with an occasional prompt from the interviewer, but otherwise allowing the subject’s stories to unfold naturally. In one very endearing interview with two women on the beach, one of the subjects becomes the interviewer herself, asking her friend to tell her a risqué story. It feels like you are listening in on a completely private conversation, and the women barely seem to notice the camera at all. I’m always impressed with people that can draw interviews like that out of people in such a quiet and unobtrusive way.

For a film that is almost entirely made up of talking heads, I thought O Amor Natural was incredibly interesting to watch. Of course the subject matter helps (I mean, who doesn’t like a film about sex?) but the characters that are revealed through the interviews, and the portrait of the poet that emerges by the end of film are what really carries the viewer through.

(Here's a clip from the film if you're interested.)