Consumida/Consumed: The Many Roles of Clara in Good Manners (2018)

by: Bruna Foletto Lucas , February 6, 2024

The Brazilian horror film As Boas Maneiras/Good Manners (2018), co-directed by Juliana Rojas, depicts the life of Clara, a lower class, Black, queer Brazilian woman. Clara is a live-in domestic worker caring for Ana, a heavily pregnant, wealthy woman. Clara and Ana develop a romantic relationship and, when Ana dies giving birth to Joel, Clara is left to care for the child. My video essay ‘Consumida/Consumed’ explores the treatment of Clara, and illustrates how the film works to depict Clara’s inner life in the midst of representing her tiring and oppressive routine, before considering how she eventually overcomes the turmoil she faces. As such, I suggest that As Boas Maneiras privileges the perspective and interior life of a woman whose identity is usually marginalised in cinema.

‘Consumida/Consumed’ juxtaposes Clara’s wary but assertive gaze and voice with Ana’s outgoing, free lifestyle. While it maintains Clara’s position as observer (for example, watching and assessing Ana), it also demonstrates the power of Clara’s silence. She withholds her thoughts from others and from the audience as a way to guard herself. More importantly, her silence does not imply she is silenced. One of the ways that women can create their own language outside of phallocentric culture is through song (Bainbridge 2008). Thus, the only sound heard in ‘Consumida/Consumed’ is a song Clara sings in a time of distress. It is the only time in the film when her feelings become clear to the audience as Clara pleads for her son to come home. My video essay also foregrounds the roles Clara must undertake: caretaker, cleaner, and eventually mother. I chose to use multiscreen to emphasise these multiple roles. While multiscreen may invite the viewer to focus on one quadrant more than another, at the same time, it only it also emphasises Clara’s constant work, and the simultaneous nature of the many roles she has to fulfil. Live-in domestic workers in Brazil are required to be subordinate, and to prioritise their employer’s life over their own. As such, they experience internalised oppression which manifests through occupational injustices and restrictions (Dos Santos et al. 2019). The video essay thus emphasises Clara’s physical and emotional strain, and shows how she becomes consumed by these roles, both literally and figuratively, as she gives her body to Ana and to Joel.

The upper left quadrant of the video essay emphasises Clara’s consumption by Ana and Joel. The upper right one shows Clara as Ana’s caretaker, as she helps Ana with her physical pains. The bottom left depicts Clara as a cleaner and emphasises the discrepancy between where she lives and where she works. The bottom right depicts Clara as a mother. Clara’s acceptance of motherhood is not a stereotype of female fulfilment, but an exploration of her life after Ana, and as such, this is the only quadrant where Clara is smiling. The multiscreen demonstrates how Clara’s roles are not fulfilled separately and sequentially, but weave together and bleed into one another. My video essay affirms the construction of Clara as a character who recognises the stereotypes afforded to Black, lower-class inhabitants of Brazil, but who then creates her own individuality and language, apart from other people. ‘Consumida/Consumed’, therefore, grants space for Clara to manifest herself in a way that is chosen by her and her alone.