Little feminist miracle on witchcraft and sisterhood, Alma Viva is the best movie of the week and we explain why you will love it, without spoilers !
Alma Viva, what is it about?
Like every summer, little Salomé returns to the family village, nestled deep in the Portuguese mountainsholidays.
While these start carefree, his beloved grandmother suddenly dies.
While the adults are torn about the funeral, Salomé is haunted by the spirit of one who was considered a witch.
Entering the border between two worlds, thanks to the open gaze of a little girl
Feminism, ghosts and cinema. All these things that a priori have nothing to do with each other, director Cristèle Alves Meira highlights a deep bond that unites them, through the richness of her staging.
In Alma Viva, everything takes place through the eyes of its little heroine, Salomé. Agile, silent, very intelligent and loving, Salomé always has Eyes wide open.
She lives surrounded by a crowd of characters: her aunts, mother, grandmothers, uncles, neighbors… In most of the shots in the film, the characters are so numerous and busy that one perceives only confusion and one cannot see all: the bodies are cut off the bounds of the frame. But it doesn’t matter, what interests the director less is this world of adults, than the gaze of the little girl, who tries to grasp the profound meaning of what is happening around her, between these living and these dead.
It is from this look, that no one seems to notice, that a new dimension of existence will open up, open to the invisible. True ball of love, attentive to the respect and happiness of each one, Salome will not be calm when her grandmother dies in strange conditions, after eating a fish offered by a jealous and slanderous neighbor.. Salomé is convinced that her grandmother was poisoned. Since, mourning is impossible for the little girl, determined not to let him go and to make the people who hurt her grandmother pay.
While during the day the adults burst into tears, into cries of pain inside imploring the saintsbut also in reproaches and shouts, to find out who will have to pay for the tombstone or which caused the curse that fell on the grandmother, Salome will wake up at night when everyone is asleep.
The footage then becomes delightfully strange and fascinating. It’s like the director is leading us to the extremely porous border between the world of the living who mourn the disappeared, and the dead, whose presence we still feel because they were knocked down in their momentum of life.
Is Salome a witch?as some men of the village say?
The richness and complexity of a popular and feminine environment, as rarely seen in the cinema
Very quickly, we get itAlma Viva East a practically unclassifiable film. With a particularly surprising realism, Cristèle Alves Meira films a popular milieu, often shunned on the big screen. In Salome’s house, we slide on Tinder even at 50 years oldWe insults himself shamelessly for stories of money or “stolen” husbands, even between grandmothers, just like us dance to the beat of a reggaeton tube on Youtube and we explain to her hilarious and cute granny how twerking.
That doesn’t stop the film from sliding towards dreamlikesometimes almost borrowing from horror cinema – as when Salomé, suspected of being possessed by a spirit, must swallow a whole hen’s head raw he had to deliver itor he wakes up covered in blood in a stable where all the animals have been decimated…
The most emblematic scenic choice of this film’s duality between imagination and realism It is in the images of very real fires, which have devastated part of the Portuguese forests. Absolutely moving, the images appear immediately after Salomé and her grandmother be called witches and stonedduring a funeral march.
Fire images leave room for imagination and interpretation: violent, tragic and very real, they appear as an allegory of sexism. But, and this is all the richness of the film, we can also imagine that they are a metaphor for it fury that burns in Salome.
What’s more evocative than fire to evoke both the power of witches and the violence of their destined destiny?
“Sooner or later, every independent woman is called a witch”
Straddling between a prosaic and a spirituality exasperated, observing this social environment is fascinating. The director never tells us what true or falsewhich is good or bad. Salomé continues her journey, observes, listens, experiences the limits of the visible and of magic accompany grandmother to eternal rest, and break free from the grip of the dead and adults.
Where the film turns out to be a little gem is that by embracing all this complexity, it questions the myth of the witch, as a sexist stigma, but also as a form of power for her heroines.
Towards the end of the film, Salomé’s uncle, a blind man whose sensitivity gives him greater lucidity than the sighted says this sentence, “Sooner or later, every independent woman is called a witch”. Finally, this quote eminently political, feministand also at the opening an imaginary world of magic and sorcery could sum up Alma Viva…
Source: Madmoizelle
Mary Crossley is an author at “The Fashion Vibes”. She is a seasoned journalist who is dedicated to delivering the latest news to her readers. With a keen sense of what’s important, Mary covers a wide range of topics, from politics to lifestyle and everything in between.
