While I'm dying...

VIỆT AND NAM

Two new dramas—from the Vietnamese director Truong Minh Quy, and from the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes—embark on hypnotic, mind-bending treks between past and present.

By Justin Chang April 3, 2025

“Việt and Nam,” by Truong Minh Quy.Courtesy of Strand Releasing

Every good film is, to some degree, a transporting experience—a dissolution of boundaries between here and there, then and now. See enough of them, from all over the world, and they begin to feel like the cheapest way to travel. Two of the finest voyages you can take in a theatre right now are themselves saturated in wanderlust. “Việt and Nam,” from the Vietnamese writer and director Truong Minh Quy, ventures from north to south before setting its gaze on dangerous new horizons; “Grand Tour,” from the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Gomes, is a country-hopping screwball movie. Both, as it happens, commenced their own journeys at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and arrived, last week, at their U.S. ports of call. Although they could hardly differ more in tone, form, and rhythm—“Grand Tour” is a restlessly kinetic romp, “Việt and Nam” the stateliest of drifters—each is nothing less than an invitation to get thoroughly, blissfully lost.

The title characters in “Việt and Nam” are two gay men, in their twenties, who work as coal miners in a northern Vietnamese village. They spend their days sweating in subterranean caverns, extracting coal and, when they are alone, making love with ecstatic abandon. The most striking image finds Việt (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) and Nam (Pham Thanh Hai) locked in a dirt-caked embrace, their bodies illuminated by the hard shimmer of anthracite. You fear for their safety—even in a small, rural town, there are surely less jagged, more hygienic places for a tryst—but Truong and the cinematographer Son Doan transform this rugged hideaway into a vision of bejewelled splendor. The lovers may be hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface, but, surrounded by countless glinting points of light, they might as well be floating among the stars.

“Việt and Nam” is full of such ravishing reversals: dream sequences that initially, and uncannily, mimic the texture of reality; characters whose identities come into focus only through some strategic repositioning of the camera. Truong, who directed two previous features (“The Tree House,” from 2019, and a documentary, “The City of Mirrors,” from 2016), cultivates an oneiric disorientation, predicated, as the title suggests, on blurry juxtapositions and divisions. Việt and Nam are in love, but not inseparable; Nam, seeking a better life, wants to move abroad. The year is 2001—early on, someone announces that planes have struck the World Trade Center—but, psychologically, the protagonists are mired in an earlier time and in an earlier tragedy.

In a dim, cavelike hut where Nam lives with his mother, Hoa (Nguyen Thi Nga), a TV blares the names of soldiers who were killed during the war, in the nineteen-seventies, but whose remains were never found. Among them is Nam’s father, who, several months before Nam was born, died fighting for the Viet Cong, somewhere in the jungle near the North-South border. Hoa goes to bed each night looking forward to seeing her late husband in her dreams; she even keeps a journal where she writes down what she’s convinced are messages from him concerning the whereabouts of his final resting place. In the hopes of finding it, Việt and Nam travel south with Hoa and a veteran, Ba (Le Viet Tung), who served alongside Nam’s father.

“Việt and Nam” is a series of excavations, and, for all its gentle cadences—a shot of jungle leaves rustling in the wind about approximates the story’s rhythm—it seems to unearth new mysteries and paradoxes by the minute. In the mines, Việt and Nam dig and dig with an intensity that will surely hasten their own deaths; but they also find a refuge where they can experience love and, therefore, life. In their search for Nam’s father, Nam and Hoa enlist the help of a famed psychic who specializes in locating soldiers’ remains. Her theatrics are surely an elaborate hoax, but for many who have spent decades grieving it may not matter. The psychic’s interventions seem to promise, through sheer power of suggestion, a cathartic measure of closure.

But is it enough? The sad, longing look on Hoa’s face, after the psychic relays a communication from her husband, offers little clarity. Nam, for his part, must sift through the remnants of a conflict that ended almost before his life began. In the South, he and his travelling companions visit war museums and memorials; at one point, the group, while digging in a spot that Hoa believes could be her husband’s unmarked grave, uncovers an undetonated bomb. In another film, it might’ve gone off, but, in “Việt and Nam,” the mere discovery is jolting enough. A pursuit for closure unearths the opposite, a reminder that the horrors of war aren’t easily shaken off.

If the weight of the past bears down on Việt and Nam, so does the grim uncertainty of the future. Truong drew inspiration from a 2019 tragedy in which thirty-nine Vietnamese migrants were found dead in a refrigerated truck in the U.K. The film alludes to those events obliquely, with an image of haunting power that I’ll leave you to discover for yourself. Audiences in Vietnam, alas, haven’t had that chance. The Vietnamese Cinema Department has banned the film, citing its “gloomy, deadlocked, and negative view” of the country. This sad and sublimely beautiful movie, however, refuses to bog itself down in pessimism. Việt and Nam’s village is no bastion of queer acceptance, but their relationship has its supporters, Hoa among them, and the men seem to regard the threat of exposure as more of an inconvenience—and, in one scene, a source of unexpected levity—than of alarm. A good thing, too: in a film where the presence of death feels like the heaviest of weights, the pure force of Việt and Nam’s desire is almost enough to keep them going.

To wander from “Việt and Nam” into “Grand Tour” would be a bit like emerging from a cave and immediately hopping aboard a Ferris wheel, a train, then a steamboat, a taxi, a motorcycle, and an aerial tram, only to realize, with a start, that each of these vehicles has been a sort of time machine. Shot mostly in black-and-white, with the occasional splash of color, the film is a gorgeous, freewheeling contraption; it never stops, rarely slows down, and always seems to be headed, dizzyingly, in at least two directions. It’s also thunderously romantic, although the romance here is with the possibilities of the open road. “Việt and Nam” gives us a couple on the brink of separation; “Grand Tour” does the same, but with a sadder (if also funnier) twist: its two leads never appear together.

They are Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a British civil servant, and Molly (Crista Alfaiate), his fiancée of seven years. No longer wishing to marry Molly, if he ever really did, Edward flees from Mandalay to Rangoon to Singapore to Bangkok to Saigon to Manila to Osaka to Shanghai to Chongqing. Molly follows in dogged pursuit, sending telegrams asking him to wait for her, but Edward, whom she sometimes misses by a matter of minutes, never does. Between Edward’s cold (but quick) feet and Molly’s unflagging tenacity, “Grand Tour,” at times, plays like a live-action Pepé Le Pew cartoon, albeit one in which Edward, the hapless pursuee, is also the stinker. (Gomes, one of four credited co-writers, has claimed an older inspiration, from 1930: “The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong,” a collection of writings by W. Somerset Maugham, about his travels across Southeast Asia.)

The film takes place in 1918—but that isn’t quite right. Can a film really be said to take place in 1918 if nearly half its material constitutes a nonfiction collage of twenty-first-century life? Gomes, who won Cannes’ Best Director prize last year, is a skilled and inveterate trickster whose films, such as “Tabu” (2012) and “Arabian Nights” (2015), delight in blurring formal and temporal boundaries. Gomes’s previous feature, “The Tsugua Diaries” (2021), which he co-directed with Maureen Fazendeiro, was a pandemic-era movie about the making of a pandemic-era movie, and it playfully unfurled its story backward. As it happens, “Grand Tour” is also something of a pandemic-era movie. Gomes and his crew began shooting it in early 2020, gathering footage across Asia on a grand tour of their own; COVID cut things short, and production resumed in 2022. What emerged from the shoot was a rich trove of quotidian snapshots—of boat rides, car treks, markets, a cockfight, a karaoke performance, a mah–jongg game—that subsequently informed, and were eventually grafted onto, Edward and Molly’s story. (The film credits three directors of photography—Rui Poças, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and Guo Liang—and two editors, Telmo Churro and Pedro Filipe Marques.)

We are flung, then, into a kind of giddy temporal maelstrom, in which geography is the only constant. Edward and Molly’s moods, thoughts, and decisions are explained in steady snippets of voice-over, but the narrators themselves keep changing—and switching languages—as the characters’ journey continues apace. The film slips between colonial past and post-colonial present with hilarious ease; the camera might follow a feverish Molly into a wilderness, only to emerge in roughly the same spot more than a century later. At one point, Edward flees a dance in Bangkok; after we lose him in a flurry of waltzing bodies, Gomes, caught up in the moment, suddenly deposits us into another plane of elaborately choreographed movement: a modern-day traffic circle in Saigon, full of drivers and motorcyclists.

That whole sequence is set to “The Blue Danube Waltz,” a piece that, after its magisterial showcase in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), may seem useful only for purposes of homage or parody. By running the music at length, though, and with only the gentlest of winks, Gomes all but instructs us to surrender to the exuberant earnestness and grandeur of the moment. Notably, he filmed the 1918 material with Waddington and Alfaiate on soundstages. Making no effort to conceal the creaking obviousness of the sets—the site of a locomotive crash, a veranda overlooking a beautiful garden—Gomes revels in a blatant Old Hollywood artifice. A scene in a hotel restaurant is dotted with old-fashioned iris shots; Molly responds to almost every comment with a gawky spit-laugh, in the vein of a classic screwball heroine.

The contrast between these moments and the present-day footage appears jarring on paper, and not merely owing to the differences between period stylization and documentary realism. The 1918 segments constitute a larky spectacle of antiquated privilege, in which two well-to-do white Europeans hop from country to country, many of them still in the grip of British rule. In contrast, the Asian locals we see in the contemporary footage—Burmese farmers, Thai motorists, Filipino singers, Japanese diners—have little time for such capricious whimsy; some of them regard the camera with a quizzical stare, if they acknowledge its presence at all. Remarkably, though, “Grand Tour” never buckles under the strain, or suggests any strain to begin with. It moves between cities and centuries, and teasingly undermines the relationship between sound and image, with a sly and miraculous fluidity.

Julian Schnabel’s “At Eternity’s Gate,” starring Willem Dafoe, stands in a lineage of movies that use the painter’s tortured life to probe the nature of art.

By Anthony Lane November 12, 2018

Clockwise from top left: Kirk Douglas, Willem Dafoe, Jacques Dutronc, Tim Roth.Illustration by Mike McQuade; photographs from (clockwise from top left): Everett; CBS Films / Everett; Marka / Alamy; Arena Films / Belbo Films / Central Films / Album / Alamy

A man walks into a field. The day is young. He starts to run, then stops and lies down on his back. He gathers handfuls of soil and sprinkles it over his face. Earth falls onto his eyes. Some goes into his mouth. Anyone passing by would think he was trying to bury himself. But he sits up, wipes his face, laughs, licks his dirty lips, and gets to work.

The scene comes from “At Eternity’s Gate,” a new film directed by Julian Schnabel, and the man is Vincent van Gogh, played by Willem Dafoe. That toothy grin is unmistakable, as is the deep, confiding tone with which Dafoe recites the words of van Gogh, in voice-over. The actor is sixty-three, whereas the painter was thirty-seven when he died—of a gunshot wound, in 1890—but you barely notice the gap between them. Dafoe’s intensity is undimmed (he seems not to have aged since his jungly exertions in “Platoon,” more than thirty years ago), and, as for van Gogh, he was worn and torn by the strain of being alive. “I have a portrait of myself, all ash-colored,” he wrote to Paul Gauguin, in 1888, and the ash figure he refers to, with sucked-in cheeks and hair cropped close to the skull, resembles a prisoner with no hope of parole. The backdrop is malachite green, quivering and sick. The question, as we confront such an image, is not how old van Gogh is but how much time he has left—how much longer he can survive on what he calls “the élan of my bony carcass.”

Schnabel’s movie feeds on that élan. A painter himself, he wants us to observe things through a painter’s unblinking eyes. Hence the opening shot, jolting and handheld, in which we share van Gogh’s point of view as he approaches a shepherdess and her flock on a country track and asks if he can sketch her. The effect is unnerving—a kind of neurotic pastoral—and, like the shepherdess, we’re not sure how to react. A while later, when the artist strides through ripening crops, we find ourselves gazing directly downward, in fascination, at the tread of his feet, as if ordinary motion were a miracle. There’s not much more that Schnabel could have done, short of filming in 3-D and arming each member of the audience with a virtual-reality headset, to put us in his hero’s shoes.

But why van Gogh? Why should his appetite for experience cry out for dramatization, when other artists go begging? One can imagine a Giacometti film, in which the cast underwent a compulsory stretch on the rack before production began; or, conversely, a Rubens bio-pic, requiring every actress to start the day with a heap of waffles and a blizzard of whipped cream. But van Gogh is the one.

He has been anointed—and travestied—as the ideal of the modern artist, even by those for whom art, modern or otherwise, is at best a diversion and at worst a scam. Everybody knows about the cutting of his ear, or cracks cruel jokes about it. His name is as famous as that of Picasso, but Picasso has been mythologized as a monster of control, whereas van Gogh, it is agreed, lay at the mercy of the uncontrollable. In his later years, he suffered acute seizures, which have since been ascribed to a number of causes, including epilepsy, syphilis, and schizophrenia. The fact of that suffering, however, is not in doubt, and posterity has both pitied him for his exhausting mental fight and venerated the result; without the fighting, we believe, we would not have the art. The ancient notion of creativity as a species of divine madness is reborn, above all, in van Gogh.

Or, rather, in Vincent, the lone word with which he signed his paintings. Other artists, some of the loftiest rank, are known by their first names: Giotto, Leonardo, Michelangelo. None, however, seem as companionable as “Vincent,” and you won’t find the word “Giotto,” bald and bold, looped in black paint at the foot of a fresco. It may be that van Gogh, whose relations with his family were fraught, chose his signature as a rebuff, loath to present himself as a van Gogh. Whatever the case, his decision has warmed and eased posterity’s embrace.

Another advantage of Vincent is that it gets millions of his admirers off the hook. They are spared the herculean horror of trying to say his last name, and the pitfalls of cultural snobbery that surround it. In “Manhattan” (1979), two couples amble down a street, discussing the overrated. Who deserves to be brought low—Mahler, Mailer, Lenny Bruce? “How about Vincent van Gogh?” Mary (Diane Keaton) asks, in playful provocation. She pronounces the name to rhyme with a Scottish loch, and Isaac (Woody Allen), who’s only just met her, flinches in disgust, mouthing and remouthing her words as if he were chewing stale cake. To him, it proves she’s a phony who tries too hard. The correct version, for him as for most other Americans, is “van Go,” and the joke is that none of them are right. Nor are the English, who plump for a cozy “van Goff.” Let’s be honest: we will never be sufficiently glottal. We should leave van Gogh to the Dutch, from whose lips “Gogh” emerges as a two-part catarrhal feast. Thank heaven for Vincent.

What this pleasing confusion shows is how zealously van Gogh has been appropriated. An industry, a revenue stream, a case history, a cautionary tale, and a cult: he is all these, and there are moments, amid the clamor, when the paintings and the drawings struggle to be heard. Arles, in southern France, where he stayed from February, 1888, until May, 1889, and where he shared a house with Gauguin for two tumultuous months, is now home to the Vincent van Gogh foundation, and feels like a shrine to his memory. You might not guess, from such fond affirmation, that a petition was raised by the townsfolk in March, 1889, complaining about the painter’s behavior and pleading that he be interned.

It is only fitting that filmmakers of distinction should, over the past seventy years, have taken up the cause of van Gogh. A small crowd of movies has ensued. In 1948, Alain Resnais made a documentary, “Van Gogh,” that won the Academy Award for Best Short Subject. Vincente Minnelli’s “Lust for Life” was released in 1956. After a long hiatus came Robert Altman’s “Vincent & Theo” (1990) and “Van Gogh” (1991), directed by Maurice Pialat, who, like Schnabel, had started out as a painter. Last year, we had “Loving Vincent,” an animated film, and now we have “At Eternity’s Gate.” So far, there’s no sign of a van Gogh zombie flick, and Vincent has yet to join the Guardians of the Galaxy. Give him time.

Like Ingmar Bergman, van Gogh was the son of a pastor. He was born in 1853, in Zundert, on the southern fringe of the Netherlands, near the Belgian border. His birth was not cursed, but it was laden with wrongness. A year before, to the day, his mother had given birth to a first Vincent, who did not survive. The second became a replacement—a poor imitation, the one who could never measure up. “He really takes no pleasure in life, walking around with head bent,” his mother reported. To learn of his early years is to discern a pattern of ambitions unfulfilled, of private entanglements that turned sour, and of schemes that were embarked on and dropped. Through family connections, he found employment with a firm of art dealers, in The Hague, London, and Paris. (His beloved brother and main financial supporter, Theo, was also an art dealer, albeit a far more successful one.) For a while, Vincent was a teacher in Ramsgate, on the English coast. He worked in a bookstore. Fierily devout, he sought to follow his father into the church.

It’s at this juncture that we first catch sight of him, in “Lust for Life.” A door opens to reveal Kirk Douglas, as van Gogh, seated on a chair. A committee calls him in and informs him that he has been rejected for the ministry. He begs for any post that will allow him to answer his vocation, and is dispatched to the Borinage, a poor coal-mining area of Belgium, as a lay preacher. Some of the strongest scenes in the film are set there, in shades of dirt brown and soot black, like the artist’s drawings of the period; at one point, he descends into a mine. Minnelli had an exacting eye for color, as “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944) and “An American in Paris” (1951) confirm, and what he grasped is that you can’t have Arles without the Borinage—that the entrance of hot color into van Gogh’s consciousness, after the flatlands of Holland, should not simply mark a change of scene. We must feel the force of an explosion.

“Lust for Life” is based on a novel of 1934 by Irving Stone. He specialized in sweaty biographical fiction, dense with fashionable psychodrama, and dedicated to the theory that art is the best and the only way to answer—and, God willing, to allay—the demands of your demons, as if they were shareholders in your spiritual corporation. Kirk Douglas, seldom a relaxed performer, launches into the role of van Gogh and switches to maximum clench. “I’m in a cage of shame and self-doubt and failure,” Vincent says to Theo (James Donald), who discovers him dwelling in dire conditions in the Borinage, striving to match his parishioners’ poverty and sleeping on straw like an ox. As Douglas averts his anguished face and casts his gaze heavenward, we are meant to recall Jesus on the Cross, and the movie renders the painter’s life as an act of sacrifice and mortification. When Gauguin (Anthony Quinn, himself no stranger to overstatement) arrives in Arles, the fellowship of the two men soon coarsens into a brawl. It’s after a spat with Gauguin that van Gogh slices his ear. From off camera comes a roar of pain.

This Vincent set a tone that has endured, and that all other onscreen Vincents have had to reckon with. Listen to Tim Roth at the start of Altman’s film, already enraged, yelling at Theo (Paul Rhys) and declaring, “I’m going to be a painter”—a plan at which Theo laughs. No one is better than Roth at the sulk-and-skulk, and that gingery temper is paired with the stiff red thatch of his hair, but the van Gogh legend still lures him, like Douglas, into excess, and the last character to make such aggressive use of a tobacco pipe was Popeye.

Of all the van Goghs on film, however, Roth is the most plausible with a brush, or a charcoal stick, in his hand. Drawing a Dutch prostitute as she stretches, scratches, and squats to pee in a chamber pot, he pays her a loving attention that no one else ever will pay, and his eyes blaze as they flick back and forth between the paper and her half-clad form. Out in the open air, he licks his brush between strokes, ending up with a mouth of grassy green, and, down in Arles, this visual greed becomes all the more consuming. He quaffs turpentine, and spreads blue pigment onto a crust of bread as if it were cream cheese. Man, it appears, can live by paint alone.

If Douglas is the most self-torturing of van Goghs, Dafoe the most readily enraptured, and Roth the one that you’d least want to meet on a dark night, what should we make of Jacques Dutronc, in Pialat’s “Van Gogh”? A musical star in France, Dutronc is little known elsewhere, and his acting credits are sparse. Yet his van Gogh is an extraordinary creature, precisely because he seems so ordinary: thin, thoughtful, sorry for the trouble that he causes now and then, but graced with a quiet sense of humor, and perfectly capable, when his health allows, of enjoying himself. To the people around him—all of whom interest Pialat just as much as van Gogh does—he is no big deal. (Irving Stone would have walked out of this movie and called his lawyers. How dare anyone defame a great artist with accusations of normality?) When, during a riverside stroll, among friends, on a Sunday afternoon, Vincent suddenly peels away and falls into the water, like a tired child collapsing into bed, he is fished out without a fuss, and the lazy day flows on.

The most unlikely van Gogh is conjured up by Akira Kurosawa, in “Dreams” (1990). A Japanese man of the present day is magically transported into a series of van Gogh’s works, trotting in bewilderment down painted roads. He spies the artist, who is feverishly drawing haystacks in a field. We know it’s him, because he sports a straw hat and a bandage round his head: the standard accoutrements of any onscreen Vincent. But who can that be beneath the hat brim? Hello, it’s Martin Scorsese! The giveaway is the eyebrows—carrot-colored now, but still as bushy as ever—and the passionate speed of the chatter, though what a wise guy from Queens is doing in nineteenth-century Provence is anyone’s guess. “To me this seems beyond belief,” he says. You’re not the only one.

One van Gogh is more heard than seen. In “Vincent,” a ravishing documentary of 1987, strewn with paintings and drawings, John Hurt, in his softly scalding voice, reads out passages from the letters of van Gogh. The director is Paul Cox, most of whose films are patient studies in solitude, and Vincent fits right in. Few painters, though, have been more verbally profuse, and the letters that he sent to Theo, more than six hundred in all, have no equal as a testament of artistic faith, nagging away at the problems of artistic representation. Gradually, we see how much this effort has cost him, in happiness and worldly fortune, as he toils to resolve them.

To browse a volume of the correspondence is to wade through ruminations on color, blooming on almost every page. “Town violet, star yellow, sky blue-green; the wheatfields have all the tones: old gold, copper, green gold, red gold, yellow gold, green, red and yellow bronze,” van Gogh writes, recounting what he has painted at the height of the mistral. But is he listing what he actually saw, or what was vouchsafed to him in the euphoric act of seeing? “A painter does well if he starts from the colors on his palette instead of starting from the colors in nature,” he tells Theo, in October, 1885. He adds:

I mean, when one wants to paint a head, say, and one looks closely at the nature one has before one, then one might think, this head is a harmony of reddish brown, violet, yellow, all broken—I’ll put a violet and a yellow and a reddish brown on my palette, and break them into each other.

So much is portended here, in van Gogh’s inch-by-inch ambitions. He is pursuing a tough line of perceptual inquiry, one that will lead to Matisse and beyond. “The painter of the future is a colorist such as there hasn’t been before,” he writes, underlining the prediction. What’s far from clear, though, is how cinema should hew to such a line—how a movie, even in resplendent Technicolor, can hope to catch those breaks.

In an early section of “Lust for Life,” Minnelli sets out to do a van Gogh. A family of Dutch peasants settles down to a meal. The women wear stiff and elaborate headgear: patches of white in the humble gloom. Across the room sits the artist, capturing the occasion on paper. We realize that he is making preliminary sketches for “The Potato Eaters,” of 1885, and that the filmmaker, no less busy, is reconstituting the painting as accurately as can be. To make things easier for us, the image keeps dissolving from painted faces to real ones, while, in voice-over, Theo quotes his brother’s stated intention: “I want to paint something that smells of bacon stew and steam.” Fair enough, but movies don’t smell, and all I can think of, whenever I watch the sequence, is the casting director going crazy in the hunt for suitable extras: “O.K., get me a lunk with a knobbly schnozz. And the wife has gotta have this big dumb grin, right across her map. I don’t care, just find them.”

The potato sequence is cleverly done, though the ploy could get out of hand; good luck with finding olive trees as writhingly gnarled as van Gogh’s. Moreover, it’s founded on the assumption that painting is little more than superior transcription—that the details of reality exist to be noted and recorded. But that won’t do for van Gogh, or for anyone else, which is why, in “Vincent & Theo,” Altman goes nuts among the sunflowers. A field of them crams the screen, and the camera, down at their level, whips and zooms, pulsing back and forth in outright panic. The air is not joyous but oppressive, and van Gogh, standing there at his easel, admits defeat, grabbing the picture and stamping on it as if he were putting out a fire. What Altman, the indomitable ironist, wants us to bear in mind is the start of his film, set in 1987, in a real sale room at Christie’s, where one of van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” is up for grabs. That painting eventually went for forty million dollars. And we think van Gogh was mad.

Lying beneath every van Gogh movie, unassuageable, is an itch of impatience with the medium. Film is a flat skin, or, latterly, an aggregation of pixels, and what it lacks is texture. You cannot run your fingers over it as you can over a canvas, feeling for ridges and rifts. No special effect, however costly, and no closeup, however intimate, can rival the layering of oils into a sticky paintscape, although, Lord knows, directors have tried. Without warning, in “At Eternity’s Gate,” everything onscreen is suffused with solar yellow, and the initial shot of “Lust for Life” pulls us straight into the heart of a van Gogh sun, with its disk of radiant paste. “Warmer, warmer,” Minnelli seems to say, as if willing us to be blinded and burned.

A novel response to this craving arrived with “Loving Vincent.” Directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, and composed of more than sixty-five thousand hand-painted frames, this restlessly animated work may be the first motion picture—and is definitely the first van Gogh movie—to consist of famous pictures in motion. Whether or not you frequent the Met, for instance, you will be acquainted with “Wheat Field with Cypresses,” from 1889, and with the tall tree at the far right of the painting, like a green-black flame. You can almost see it flicker. Now, thanks to “Loving Vincent,” it really does flicker, while the wheat stalks thrash to and fro, and the clouds boil in the sky. The world is Vincentified, and the painting is brought to life.

That, at any rate, is the movie’s mission, and, despite the dazzle of its technical accomplishment, you can’t help wondering what it’s for. Who said that the wheat field was short of life in the first place? Isn’t the illusion of movement in the cypress—its energy rooted and withheld, the thrust and sway of it eternally about to happen—all the more vital for being trapped so thrillingly in paint? “Loving Vincent” is set after the artist’s death, in the places that he used to haunt, with a steady supply of flashbacks, and a sleuth-like hero who wanders vaguely around. He enters the bar, in Arles, that we know as “The Night Café” (1888), with its harsh green ceiling and its scarlet walls. The lamps shimmer, as they do in the painting, but here the curving lines of light vibrate to indicate the passing of time; the effect, oddly, is not to enhance the original vision but to drain it of hallucinatory power, nudging it toward the brink of kitsch.

One thing that the sleuth attempts to unlock is the secret, such as it is, of van Gogh’s demise. For decades, it was accepted that he shot himself, and the movies concurred with the biographers; if Kirk Douglas used a gun, it must be true. Then, in 2011, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith brought out their brick-size “Van Gogh: The Life,” with an appendix entitled “A Note on Vincent’s Fatal Wounding.” They suggest that van Gogh may have been killed, in error, jest, or anger, by “a reckless teenager with fantasies of the Wild West,” who often carried an old revolver for show. This account—which, according to the authors, clears up nine anomalies of the case—is not widely accepted, but it’s good enough for Schnabel, who relies upon it for his film, although the resulting scene is so oblique that most viewers will be mystified. I’ll stick with Pialat, who, typically, has van Gogh stumble into view with a bloodstained belly, and without explanation or complaint. How he came by his wound is of no consequence; all that need concern us is that, around thirty hours later, he dies.

To moviegoers, the legacy that he bequeaths is a mixed one. We are schooled in multiple stories of van Gogh, and bemused by the range of available Vincents. But we are also tempted into a strange historical vanity, with a touch of counterfactual compassion. When he is chided, at the start of “At Eternity’s Gate,” for covering the wall of a bar with unsellable art, we want to shake the barkeeper and command him to see sense. Van Gogh sold one painting in his life, but we—so we reassure ourselves—would have purchased everything, down to the meanest daub. We would have summoned medication and therapeutic care for his afflicted brain. The fatal bullet could have been extracted. We could have saved him.

This is nonsense. Although we know more, we are no better. Most of us would have avoided van Gogh, ignored him, or taken offense at him, as his contemporaries did. As for fame, he likened it to “sticking your cigar in your mouth by the lighted end.” He was a difficult soul, and some of his sexual dealings were edged with threat. “I always have an animal’s coarse appetites,” he confessed to Gauguin, and one of the witnesses cited in the Arles petition claimed that van Gogh was “given to touching the women of the neighbourhood, whom he follows right into their homes.” There’s a credible and dismaying sequence, late in Schnabel’s film, when van Gogh returns to the shepherdess on the track—the one whom he wanted to sketch at the start. This time, he assaults her.

Yet the idea of him as a sort of hobo-saint will not be dispelled. Thousands throng the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam, and the stubborn fantasy that he somehow belongs to us is nicely enshrined in an episode of “Doctor Who,” from 2010, when Vincent (Tony Curran) is spun through time and space to the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris, to a room lined with paintings, where he hears a curator (Bill Nighy) extoll him as “the most popular great painter of all time.” Hold on, there’s more: “Not only the world’s greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.” Yikes. This charming exercise in wish-fulfillment, in case you hadn’t guessed, was written by Richard Curtis.

Maurice Pialat, needless to say, is immune to considerations of greatness—a rhetorical varnish that, despite its gleam, shows us nothing new. “It’s not so much a golden as an iron age for painters,” Vincent wrote, and, of all the movies about him, it is the least shining, Pialat’s “Van Gogh,” that tells the most iron truths, and has the courage to conceive of art as work. Everything about van Gogh tells of hard labor: the countryside where he preached, and the grinding routine of its inhabitants; the postures of the diggers and the weavers whom he drew there; the monochrome murk of the early paintings, which have never received their due on film; the ceaseless travail with color, once he went south; the constant want of money; the conflicts with his fellow-painters and with regular citizens; and the pressures that built up within him—his heart, his skull, his vulnerable gut.

Killers of the Flower Moon is Based on a true American story.

At the turn of the 20th century, oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight. The wealth of these Native Americans immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting to murder.

Based on a true story and told through the improbable romance of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), “Killers of the Flower Moon” is an epic western crime saga, where real love crosses paths with unspeakable betrayal. Also starring Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, John Lithgow, Brendan Fraser, Tantoo Cardinal, Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, and Jillian Dion, Killers of the Flower Moon is directed by Academy Award winner Martin Scorsese from a screenplay by Eric Roth and Scorsese, based on David Grann’s best-selling book.

Hailing from Apple Studios, Killers of the Flower Moon was produced alongside Imperative Entertainment, Sikelia Productions and Appian Way. Producers are Scorsese, Dan Friedkin, Bradley Thomas and Daniel Lupi, with DiCaprio, Rick Yorn, Adam Somner, Marianne Bower, Lisa Frechette, John Atwood, Shea Kammer and Niels Juul serving as executive producers.

Song: "Stadium Pow Wow (feat. Black Bear)" by The Halluci Nation https://apple.co/‎StadiumPowWow

By Vinson CunninghamEssays — Mar 24, 2026

Toward the beginning of Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), Martin Scorsese’s guileful masterwork of unguileful plunder, a few young members of the Osage Nation are shown in a moment of reverie. They’re jumping and yelling, all elation and sublime relief, their skin covered in rich black oil. The fruit of the earth has brought their people great material wealth, and that’s enough reason to have fun, get hedonistic, throw a party. Scorsese casts the scene in slow motion—that time signature of self-indulgent pleasure—and scores it with pulsating drums. The oil boom is a blessing. Never mind the foreboding that is humming underneath.

Scorsese is, among other things, the great choreographer of glittering moments that come before a great fall. Think of all those grotesque scenes of money-crazed debauchery on the trading floor in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). One woman agrees to let her head of long blond hair be shaved for ten thousand bucks. In Goodfellas (1990), there’s a long, sumptuous take of Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, a gangster on the upswing, guiding his new girlfriend through the back rooms of the Copacabana. Down a flight of stairs and through narrow, dark passageways, into the bustling kitchen, and, finally, out onto the low-lit, dapper floor, where a table is promptly set up for them. Remember the bright color of the tables in Casino (1995), seen from so high above. This is what it looks like to arrive.

All of this is going to go bad, and so it does with Killers. But the Osage people are no gangsters, and Killers traces a very different arc. It tells the story of a florid true crime: how, in the 1920s, the oil wealth of the Osage was stolen by way of a dastardly scheme to murder its rightful inheritors, one by one, through means both clandestine and surreally frank, making all the spoils of that black gold end up in white hands. David Grann’s 2017 book about the murders and the FBI operation that led to their exposure served as source material for Scorsese’s almost three-and-a-half-hour epic: a fitting canvas for a sprawling shame.

And so, in Killers, a darker mood sets in soon. Throughout the story, the Osage show signs of their new wealth: splendid suits and dresses, fancy Pierce-Arrow motorcars, tasteful jewelry. Early on, there is sometimes a spirited dance, where prospective lovers drink and flirt. But slowly, the prior joy begins to shift to watchful restraint, a growing understanding that seemingly all of their white neighbors have trained hungry eyes on their bounty, dead set on getting a piece by way of banking or funeral services or intermarriage or petty theft or outright murder. A foreknowledge of pain kicks up what Emily Dickinson calls a “formal feeling.”

Lily Gladstone, playing Mollie Kyle, is the paragon of this sobriety. When she meets Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, a rascally cabdriver who is the nephew of the most powerful white man in town, she regards him with a calm irony. He starts to flirt with her, and, immediately, with instincts honed by experience, she knows he’s a “coyote” attracted by cash. She doesn’t shout or get worked up or make a big show of falling in love. And yet, as Killers drags her through a doubled ordeal—the relentless string of deaths of her sisters and her mother, and a steep decline in health, both helped along by Ernest—her muted demeanor becomes a kind of sorrow song. Gladstone plays a morbid music almost solely by the use of her eyes. She looks at Ernest, begging him for some shred of reassurance, even as he leads her closer to the grave. Her glances contain knowing (she and her people are likely doomed, largely because of men like her husband) but also hope. Maybe not this time.

In one passage, perhaps the most affecting of the film, Ernest walks into their house, about to deliver yet another item of bad news. The camera, describing his guilty perspective, peeks into room after room, hesitantly gliding through the home. When he finally opens the door to the basement, where Mollie and the rest of her family have been hiding in fear, all he has to do is give her a look. She starts to moan and wail in her husky voice.

Gladstone’s performance as Mollie is the sad, true heart of this film, a force that connects the various strands of thematic substance not only in Killers but across many of Scorsese’s investigations. Killers is actually, in some ways, yet another Scorsese gangster flick, filled with unscrupulous, secretly organized types with no morality other than money, and a thin, nihilistic idea of what it means to enjoy a good life. But it is also, in the Jesuit sense, an examination of conscience, a white filmmaker’s prayerful, bracing questioning of what it means to live on this land. Scorsese, a cradle Catholic famously interested in vice, has long wrestled with the highest themes of his religion: sin and forgiveness, violence and grace. In this way, Mollie’s interior suffering—call it a Passion—can sometimes remind us of the travails of the Portuguese missionaries to Japan depicted in Silence (2016). Or of the baffled wanderings of Jesus, played by an ecstatic Willem Dafoe, in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). In Killers, and especially in the person of Mollie Kyle, Scorsese’s feuding interests in adrenal energy and contemplative reflection are finally, furiously twinned.

“I do love that money, sir,” Ernest says to his uncle William Hale by way of honestly assessing his own character. Hale, played by Robert De Niro, takes that information in stride—who doesn’t?—and wants to know even more. What kinds of women does his nephew like? As in, racially? “I like red. I like white. I like blue,” Ernest says, maybe accidentally painting the mental image of a sexualized United States flag. This dark collision between DiCaprio and De Niro, the chief prophet-protagonists of Scorsese’s oeuvre down the years, is so funny because of its agile handling of American types. De Niro is the wised-up operator, the calloused veteran, the kind of guy who shakes your lapels and gives you a lesson on the harder sides of life—how, indeed, to harden your own heart. Saul Bellow called this kind of person a “reality instructor.”

Hale struts around town offering his help and companionship to the Osage, pretending to be their foremost friend, speaking and praying quite fluently in their language. And yet he is also nakedly the author of their destruction. He suggests marriages that soon end in brutal sickness, provides advice to the tribal council that always comes to nothing and often ends in blood. Part of the horror-show quality of Killers is this portrait of the corrosive open secret. Everybody knows, nobody knows. The headrights of the Osage—their rightful possession of the oil—keep sliding downward toward the whites. In a montage of notionally “unexplained,” stubbornly uninvestigated deaths, we see a young Osage woman pushing a baby in a pram. Out of nowhere, a white man materializes: he placidly shoots her in the head. We’re informed that the death has been classified as a suicide. Whatever she once owned will now roll downhill to somebody else. Guess who?

The stoic certainty of this theft is always apparent in De Niro’s eyes. It’s also the guiding aesthetic behind Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography, which takes broad daylight and human faces and turns them into a nightmarish instruction in the reality of the west at the turn of the twentieth century. In one sequence—yet another station of the cross—Mollie slowly approaches a ravaged corpse. She knows it’s her sister’s, but she must be holding on to hope that there’s been some mistake. We see a sea of faces, a crowd gathered to view the evidence of a lynching. We get the news through their expressions, even more than through the awful image to come. Prieto has worked as DP on The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman (2019), and now Killers. You might think of these films as making up an unquiet quartet on the theme of redemption—how abundantly available it is, how rarely grasped. Lately, Scorsese has doubled down on his natural moralism, aiming his art directly at the places and moments where human beings make decisions, take chances, head out in the direction of corruption or salvation. His and Prieto’s elegant compositions make X-rays of these junctures, and of the sure, inescapable ends toward which they lead.

This determinism can also be found in the music direction of Robbie Robertson, who somehow manages to best his always astute previous work with Scorsese. Killers’ scoring scorches the viewer. There is always a driving drum and a sharp, unlovely melody—guitar, horn, harsh singing—lurking somewhere in this film. Many of the most affecting musical moments meld Native rhythms and rock-and-roll sound, implying and enacting the great churn of American cultural synthesis even while the violence underpinning the encounter is on fervent display. The drums and bass lines, often melting into one another in a droning monotone, keep up a thread of gruesome suspense.

Thelma Schoonmaker’s fleet editing—here more patient and plangent than ever before, her vision maturing in tandem with her longtime collaborator Scorsese’s—sings in harmony with Robertson’s tunes. The message is clear: Fate isn’t just waiting for you. It’s seeking you out and gathering speed. Part of the texture of Schoonmaker’s work in Killers is her handling of the archival images. These photographs—of Osage families posing in high style, of lands that we now know to be spotted with innocent blood—pull at the film’s viewers, threading their consciousnesses into a quilt of complicity. Admire the images, swoon at the performances—still, there’s a constant, artifice-exploding whisper: this is real, this is real, this is real.

Hale is the bard of that sick realism. Speaking to his feckless nephew, he asks, “Ernest, you believe in the Bible? . . . Miracles of old? Expecting a miracle to make all this go away? You know they don’t happen anymore.” Scorsese and Eric Roth’s screenplay is full of brutal gems like this one, offering no escape. Ernest, as portrayed with such lyricism by DiCaprio, is a stupid, lazy man. Nobody tries to deny this. Somebody mentions his “disposition,” and everybody knows that it’s a reference to his dull intelligence. He likes whiskey and cash, wants to “sleep all day” and “make a party when it’s dark.” But in the moral world of Killers—hell, in any moral world worth its salt—this fact is no excuse for the betrayal Ernest carries out. He really loves Mollie and his children, and seems, childishly, to hope that he’ll earn some magical reprieve from the bargain he’s struck with his uncle. In this way, he’s not unlike any “unpolitical” American who, yeah, sure, understands the country’s past villainies but hopes he’ll stumble without too much work into a blameless, enjoyable life. Sin doesn’t work that way. Somebody’s got to say no.

DiCaprio’s two decades of collaboration with Scorsese have been walking in this direction all along. Like their first film together, Gangs of New York (2002), Killers is a work of minutely detailed world-building. The dust caking boots, the city streets, the dangerous landscape pregnant with symbolism: all of it researched and executed within an inch of its life. The verisimilitude feels like a hair shirt—a cleansing bit of painstaking work. DiCaprio’s performance has a touch of mortification in it too. His anguished, avoidant, sneaky, passionless facial expressions are always being undercut and made ironic by the light of truth—however distant—in his eyes. He might not comprehend the whole plan, but he knows his place in it, knows it’s wrong, is too slothful and worldly to wake up and make a cry of repentance.

The great gift of acting is that, in hands like DiCaprio’s, it can play two notes at once. We’re looking at a single man, in command of his own soul, but we are also witnessing a portrait of the national character. Killers was released in 2023, entering a world that had been chastened by the traumas and stirrings of 2020—among them the COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide rebellions following the killing of George Floyd, a conspicuous, Native-led Independence Day protest on the grounds of Mount Rushmore. Suddenly it was impossible to think of Scorsese’s fixation on spiritual reckonings in a totally personalized or privatized way. Sometimes sin happens in the heart; sometimes a whole society comes together to spill the blood of its brothers. The blood keeps crying out from the ground.

The decision to adapt David Grann’s historical tale and render it in such detailed and personal terms is a masterstroke—the latest of many thousands—by Martin Scorsese. Scraped through his tough vision, the story is, at once, a work of individual temptation and structural perdition. Scorsese’s boldest departure from Grann’s narrative, the choice to center the story on Ernest and Mollie instead of on the FBI investigation that uncovered William Hale’s crimes—on the personal instead of the official—follows Emily Dickinson’s injunction to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” The relocation points a finger—indicting and beckoning all at once—toward contemporary audiences, who, in their private hearts and out in public, have never seemed so lost, or so unsure of where the crimes of the state end and their own blithe participation begins. To begin to contemplate this very modern problem is to experience even the most everyday aspects of our lives as—Dickinson again—a dazzling, harrowing, often painful “superb surprise.”

The filmmaker doesn’t exempt himself. Killers is, too, an excruciatingly personal exercise in self-questioning: What does it mean to live here? To work and gain “success” here? To make stories—entertainments—using such sordid materials? What does it mean to be attracted to the dark? Hence the second-to-last passage of Killers—perhaps the most abstract, ironic, and unabashedly artistic set piece of Scorsese’s career. The filmmaker, looking just like himself, stands at a microphone, producing a chintzy radio play about the massacre, sanding down the jagged edges to which we all just bore witness. It’s a falsely benign punch in the gut; a sick, miniature reiteration of the whole story; a densely packed symbol of storytelling and blood: the wages of history, and of narrative itself.

The scene recalls an earlier moment in the film, a skin-prickling moment of conscience. Maybe, too, an antidote to so many big lies put forward by so-called civilization: A tribal council has been called in response to the accelerating deaths. What to do? An Osage elder, played by Everett Waller, speaks up. “We need to be like a fire on this earth,” he says, “and get rid of all that stops or gets in front of us.”

That’s Killers: a cleansing fire. It’s not supposed to feel good. The film ends with a vision of the contemporary Osage people, engaged in a dance. They sing and move in concentric circles, unified, and play imprecations on a large drum, as round and troubled as the world. If any confessional impulse lives in you, that faculty starts to vibrate with a strange and unbearable heat, a heat beyond relief. Only then the music ends.

By Adam PironEssays — Mar 24, 2026

One summer, when I must have been around seven years old, my grandmother told me a story about a wealthy Native American family. It was during the annual road trip that we would make, from Arizona through western Oklahoma’s sea of grass, to a reunion of the side of my family that hails from the Kiowa Tribe. The family she described were so incredibly rich, they lived in a mansion, owned luxury cars, and even employed white servants. The image was utterly bewildering, like something out of an alternate reality. I asked if they were part of our tribe, but she said they were not; they were Osage, from the other side of the state. I never asked how she knew about them or what became of them, and this lingering story from my childhood only gained clarity years later, when I learned of the Osage people’s history, and again in 2017, when it was announced that Martin Scorsese would be adapting David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

In his meticulously researched book, Grann details the calculated genocide of Osage tribal members in eastern Oklahoma during the 1920s. Driven by the Osage Nation’s oil wealth, white settlers orchestrated what was later called a “Reign of Terror”—a slew of murders by way of poisoning, bombing, and shooting—to seize oil headrights. Grann frames the narrative around the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry, shifting focus from the perpetrators’ identities to the systemic conspiracy, the pervasive guilt, and the frustrating pursuit of justice. The murders are highlighted as an institutional failure, yet the Osage narrative was distinct among Native American tribes because the tormentors did face prosecution, even if some ultimately evaded justice.

Scorsese’s decision to adapt this monumental book—and, critically, his willingness to confront one of America’s foundational sins, the genocide of its Indigenous people—presented an opportunity for a vital cultural moment and marked a novel direction in a career then spanning forty-two features. Given his stature, the project was uniquely positioned to achieve a scale and an audience that few, if any, other filmmakers at that time could have commanded. As a longtime admirer of the iconic director’s work, I was undeniably intrigued by the prospect; yet, as a Native person navigating an America demanding to be made great again, I felt some personal apprehension stirred up by the endeavor.

My initial concern about the film, announced during Donald Trump’s politically charged first term as president, stemmed from the turbulence in Indian Country that had erupted since his election in 2016. This era kicked off with the forced ending by the National Guard of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the weaponization of “Pocahontas” as a slur, the banning of books on Indigenous history, the increased scrutiny of racist sports-team names, and the alarming rates of violence against Native American women, often by non-Indigenous perpetrators, finally receiving national attention. I was not concerned about Scorsese’s aims, nor about his collaborations with Indigenous artists like Robbie Robertson or the Osage themselves, but rather about how non-Native audiences would react to this depiction of historical violence. Would it inspire a meaningful reevaluation of the United States’ treatment of Native peoples, or would provocateurs distort and weaponize it? Those fears were ultimately put to rest when I eventually experienced Scorsese’s dark epic—most prominently by its astonishing coda and final shot.

Undoubtedly, as a prolific student of cinema history, Scorsese went into this production aware of the medium’s troubled past with regard to Indigenous communities—defined by extractive practices, the reinforcement of damaging stereotypes, and the eclipsing of real, historical suffering for the sake of entertainment. Careful to avoid these pitfalls, he approached this adaptation through direct engagement and collaboration with the Osage themselves, an interaction that resulted in a fundamental shift in the story’s vantage point. Instead of Grann’s FBI-procedural narrative, Killers of the Flower Moon would be reoriented to focus primarily on the perspective of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and, secondarily, on that of his Osage wife, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). This reshaping exposes Ernest’s role in the genocide orchestrated by his uncle, local Southern-gentleman autocrat William King Hale (Robert De Niro), and allows the audience to observe the deterioration of Ernest’s marriage to Mollie as he slowly poisons her while eliminating members of her family and tribe. And it bolsters Scorsese’s meticulous examination of societal guilt, allowing him to scrutinize more closely every facet of how such heinous acts were able to unfold so brazenly.

While analyses often connect the spiritual themes in Scorsese’s films to his Catholic faith and his early aspiration to the priesthood, they frequently overlook that his filmmaking itself can function as an act of worship or intercessory prayer. Scorsese’s earlier films often present parables of sinners: prodigal-son types whose rises and falls are marked by either finding a semblance of salvation or being consumed by their trespasses. Examples include Jake La Motta hitting rock bottom in Raging Bull (1980), Henry Hill’s nosedive in Goodfellas (1990), and Sam “Ace” Rothstein stacking the odds against himself in Casino (1995). However, a major shift has occurred as of late in his body of work. From Silence (2016) and The Irishman (2019) to Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), Scorsese’s narrative focus has noticeably flipped from explorations of the sinner’s journey to jeremiads on the fundamental nature of sin itself, a change perhaps signaled by his increasingly winding run times (161, 209, and 206 minutes, respectively). From this perspective, one could read Silence as examining the self-destruction inflicted by sin, The Irishman as grieving the damage it does to those we love, and Killers of the Flower Moon as observing the gulf it creates between us. As if on his own road to Damascus, Scorsese has been turning increasingly inward, knowingly pondering questions that may not have answers on this side of heaven.

Scorsese’s depiction of the crimes against the Osage becomes a search for decency within an increasingly morally bankrupt world. He struggles to fully grasp the perpetrators’ boundless evil, suggesting a darkness too profound for even his lens. Potentially as a balm, Scorsese frequently turns to the Osage, consistently finding moments of light in their spiritual and communal life. Through the character of Mollie, the Osage are portrayed as living for values beyond individual self-interest, ones rooted in traditions, spiritual practices, and strong social bonds. Mollie, the film’s only explicitly Christian (specifically Catholic) character, serves as a moral anchor, bridging Osage and Christian spiritual worlds through her church attendance and mourning rites.

Mollie’s internal duality also mirrors the historical reality of Osage syncretism, which flourished during the tribe’s oil boom. Following their forced removal to Oklahoma, the Osage resisted total cultural assimilation by forging a distinct, hybrid spiritual identity, despite the efforts of missionaries to assimilate them. This was achieved by integrating Christian elements—such as equating the Christian God with the Osage Great Spirit (Wakonda)—while steadfastly maintaining their core beliefs and ceremonial life. Mollie’s practice of engaging with both Indigenous rites and Catholic services is a direct example of this blending. These are not only acts of faith but acts of survival and resistance.

Scorsese portrays Mollie as a figure of moral purity—an Indigenous Madonna enduring the suffering and violence inflicted upon her people. She embodies a natural and spiritual path forward, potentially even representing a hopeful future for the very concept of America’s soul. Her and her people’s blended spirituality—from the pipe burial to her mother, Lizzie Q, meeting with the ancestors after her death—presents the only spiritual certainty outside of the evil inflicted upon them. As the film’s moral compass, Mollie establishes a stark contrast to the more sinister characters, one most evident in her final exchange with Ernest. Following her recovery from being poisoned by him, she confronts her husband in the courthouse after he testifies against Hale’s involvement in the murders. Mollie demands that he confess his deeds, and yet, in a final, craven denial, he refuses: a potent metaphor for the original people of this land demanding that those who wronged them finally acknowledge the undeniable. Ernest’s fate—and, for Scorsese, the fate of all those who fail to admit their complicity in the United States’ sins—is sealed in damnation. The scene fades hauntingly to black.

We’re left to linger in the darkness and to sit with the weight of the irrefutable. It’s a logically bleak conclusion to witnessing over three hours of human depravity at its most brazen. Then, in an initially bewildering transition, Scorsese turns the film in on itself. The abyss is pierced by lights as Killers of the Flower Moon cuts to a packed house seated for a live broadcast of the Lucky Strike–sponsored radio show True Crime Stories. The year is somewhere in the late thirties, nearly a decade from where the film left Mollie and Ernest, and an all-white ensemble dramatically reenacts an abridged version of the preceding narrative of the “Osage Indian murders,” augmented by performed sound effects and a bandleader. The segment concludes with the players reading the fates of those involved in the murders and their eventual evasion of justice, before the show’s producer (played by Scorsese himself) steps up to the microphone to read Mollie’s 1937 obituary. He speaks somberly and observes that it conspicuously omits any mention of the killings.

This moment represents Scorsese’s ultimate scrutiny of his own endeavor to reconstruct this history through a form of popular entertainment. He turns his lens on himself, questioning his proximity to these ills and—as suggested by the absence of any Indigenous presence onstage—even the limits of his own perspective as a non-Indigenous artist. It’s also an acknowledgment of the boundaries and limitations of the medium, definitively situating both author and audience within an extension of a bleak historical chapter and prompting reflection on their shared culpability. In response to Ernest’s refusal to admit transgressions, the director acknowledges his own complicity by entering his film quite literally, seeking a path forward through simple admission. He offers an actionable route for all tied to the country’s foundational sin, presenting a choice and leading by example. Killers of the Flower Moon thus transcends the historical epic, reshaping it into a Möbius strip that blurs audience, film, and director.

This coda mirrors the film’s reinterpretation of Grann’s book after Scorsese’s collaboration with the Osage. The director’s appearance breaks the fourth wall, acknowledging an audience familiar with the source material and using this alienating moment to foster cerebral engagement. It’s a proposal to reconsider the efficacies and inefficacies of reenactments, how they can be consumed passively or used to decontextualize and transform the originals, delving deeper and becoming something novel. Scorsese recognizes that effective translation can reveal the unfathomable, mysterious, and spiritual essence of the original, reinterpreting it in a new language, striving for transformation beyond mere reproduction. It is his acknowledgment of creation itself, in this case as a form of penance or creative worship, echoing the promise from heaven’s throne in the book of Revelation: “Behold, I make all things new.” For Catholics, this signifies a new beginning and renewal through the divine, applying to spiritual transformation, new life in the sacraments, and ultimate renewal—a promise of hope and a call to a new way of living.

In a masterly transition, Scorsese transports his film to the present day, presenting an overhead, God’s-eye view of an Osage drum group. The camera then floats up, revealing tribal members engaged in a traditional counterclockwise dance, a powerful portrayal of a community not only enduring but flourishing, imbued with joy, pride, and resilience. The screen subsequently fades to black, displaying the film’s title in Osage script before converting it to English.

If Killers of the Flower Moon’s portrayal of the Osage Indian murders is Scorsese’s sermon and the True Crime Stories scene his altar call, then the singular God’s-eye view of the Osage can be interpreted as the Almighty’s final judgment, separating the unrighteous from the righteous. Scorsese’s decision to conclude the film in this way also effectively grants the Osage people the definitive final word. After taking center stage in True Crime Stories, Scorsese now steps aside. He doesn’t presume to speak for the Osage; instead, he extends an invitation to the audience to learn from them, just as he did. Much like the man cured by Jesus in the Gospel According to John, Scorsese appears to declare: “I once was blind, but now I see.”

Como Dercy Gonçalves consolidou sua imagem de diva desbocada e indecente

Adriana Negreiros  Mai 2026  07h41

Dercy em 1957, na estreia do filme 'Uma certa Lucrécia' - Crédito: Acervo UH/Folhapress

Dercy Gonçalves entrou no palco do estúdio da TV Excelsior para apresentar o número final do programa e, diante das câmeras, teve um branco. Esqueceu completamente o que deveria fazer ali. Como o improviso nunca foi um problema para ela, gritou para o regente da orquestra, Aristides Zacarias: “Maestro, mete um ritmo de macumba aí, que lá vai a perereca.” Quando os músicos entraram em ação, Dercy começou a rodar, fingindo que era mãe de santo, e improvisou uma canção, no ritmo dos instrumentos. “A perereca da vizinha/tá presa na gaiola/xô, perereca/xô, perereca.” A plateia caiu na gargalhada.

Nos bastidores, ao presenciar a cena, o ator Grande Otelo deu um cutucão na cintura do escritor Sérgio Porto, contratado pela Excelsior para escrever o programa de humor Viva o vovô Deville, do qual Dercy era a grande estrela. “Essa tal de perereca vai pegar mais que sarampo em berçário”, comentou.

Embora aquele não fosse o desfecho planejado por Sérgio Porto, ele resolveu deixá-lo na versão final do programa que logo iria ao ar. Tinha a opção, se quisesse, de fazer diferente. A popularização do videoteipe, em 1960, libertara a televisão de improvisos como aquele. Se errasse, bastava fazer de novo. Mas ele decidiu bancar o improviso.

Conforme calculara Grande Otelo, a música criada por Dercy se espalhou como vírus. O videoteipe ajudava a disseminar as atrações da tevê pelo país. Essas fitas eram enviadas para diferentes cidades nos voos da Panair, cujo dono – Mário Wallace Simonsen – era o mesmo da Excelsior. E assim os telespectadores do Recife conheceram a composição que faria sucesso no Carnaval daquele ano de 1964.

A história seria contada pelo próprio Sérgio Porto, numa de suas crônicas assinadas sob o pseudônimo de Stanislaw Ponte Preta. Além de telespectadores mais marotos, a música encantara gente respeitável, como o artista plástico pernambucano Augusto Rodrigues, um dos convidados para o Baile Municipal do Recife e “um dos grandes incentivadores da perereca”, nas palavras de Porto. Na crônica, ele conta que Rodrigues pediu autorização da primeira-dama do estado, Maria Magdalena Fiúza, para puxar o coro com o hit. “A senhora Miguel Arraes achou imensa graça no pintor e deu a licença”, escreveu Porto. “Augusto Rodrigues saiu a cantar e logo todo o salão cantava a perereca como se fosse Mamãe, eu quero”, narrou.

O escritor disse que passou a ser abordado por curiosos querendo saber a origem da canção:

A coisa foi se desenvolvendo, a ponto de um professor dos mais austeros telefonar-me para perguntar se a perereca tinha raízes folclóricas. [...] Se todos queriam enveredar pelo perigoso caminho da galhofa, eu também ia. Com a maior cara de pau, expliquei ao distinto que A perereca da vizinha era um ponto de terreiro que eu colhera na Bahia, onde os crentes de determinada seita têm a perereca como bicho sagrado.

A verdade, Sérgio Porto assumiu, é que ninguém sabia ao certo como a perereca surgira – nem mesmo Dercy. Ele se divertia ao vê-la dando entrevistas sobre o assunto, inventando uma história “cheia de truques”. Numa de suas primeiras versões, Dercy disse que, em Santa Maria Madalena, cidade do interior do Rio de Janeiro onde nasceu, tinha o costume de brincar junto com outras crianças num brejo repleto de pererecas. Certo dia, para implicar com uma senhora ranzinza, prenderam uma delas na gaiola da mulher. Depois, saíram a cantarolar: “A perereca da vizinha/está presa na gaiola.” “Ainda bem que eu não estava perto quando Dercy deu a entrevista, senão eu olhava para ela e os dois cairíamos na gargalhada”, escreveu Sérgio Porto.

Numa versão alternativa, Dercy relacionaria a música a outro episódio da infância. Certa vez, segundo ela, visitou a avó e saiu de lá com uma linguiça escondida dentro das calças. No caminho de volta para casa, enquanto pulava um muro, sentiu a linguiça escapar e cair num córrego. Ao mergulhar a mão na água para recuperar o embutido, apanhou uma perereca. Assustada, gritou: “Xô, perereca” – palavras que, anos depois, no palco da Excelsior, retornariam à sua mente, inspirando a canção. A conhecida indisposição de Dercy para respeitar texto de autor e seguir ordem de diretor nunca foi impeditivo para que ela trabalhasse na televisão. Em 1963, numa atitude agressiva para os padrões da época, a TV Excelsior havia oferecido salários muito acima da média do mercado para que artistas ingressassem no canal 2, no Rio de Janeiro. Assim, atraiu quase todo o elenco da TV Rio, incluindo alguns de seus maiores astros, como o comediante Chico Anysio e o cantor Moacyr Franco. Ao investir pesado numa programação moderna, sustentada por shows e programas humorísticos, tornou-se líder nacional de audiência, desbancando a antiga campeã, a TV Record.

Com um salário mensal de 4,5 milhões de cruzeiros, Dercy estava entre as artistas mais bem pagas da emissora – o ordenado-base era de 200 mil. A atriz Betty Faria, que tinha iniciado a carreira televisiva na TV Rio, recebia 650 mil cruzeiros. Na época, um apartamento de três quartos em Ipanema, na Zona Sul, podia ser comprado por 13 milhões. Ganhando dinheiro como nunca, sem necessidade de viajar – e se afastar da família –, Dercy anunciou que abandonaria o teatro para se dedicar apenas à televisão.

Embora o teatro tivesse dado a ela popularidade de Norte a Sul do Brasil, nada se comparava à fama que passaria a experimentar a partir de então. Pouco mais de uma década depois de a TV Tupi começar a difundir seu sinal em São Paulo, a televisão deixava de ser um produto de luxo. Em 1964, já havia mais de 1,8 milhão de televisores espalhados pelas residências do país, que na época tinha uma população de quase 79 milhões de pessoas. Reunidas em redes, as emissoras conseguiam chegar a porções cada vez maiores do território nacional.

O escrutínio sobre o trabalho de Dercy, que sempre fora intenso, atingiu proporções inéditas. Já não era preciso sair de casa para assistir – e criticar – seu estilo de atuação. Do sofá, reunidos em família, telespectadores mais sensíveis se chocavam com as caretas, olhares maliciosos e piadas de duplo sentido da artista. Um deles era Sérgio Bittencourt, o jovem crítico do Correio da Manhã. Aos 23 anos, o filho do compositor Jacob do Bandolim – e futuro compositor de canções gravadas por Wilson Simonal, Vanusa e Ângela Maria – manifestava pavor de Dercy, a quem chamava de “grotesca”. “Não dou três meses para Dercy em televisão”, apostou.

“Essa senhora é, indiscutivelmente, a mais pornográfica das ‘velhas senhoras do meu Brasil’!”, escreveu, numa de suas colunas. “Há algumas semanas, essa senhora pronunciou, bem clara, uma palavra de baixo calão. Gargalhadas no auditório, risinhos constrangidos entre a equipe do programa, vergonha nas casas ‘verdadeiramente de família’”, revoltou-se o jornalista, que conclamava “a polícia, a censura, as mães de família – ou seja lá quem for” a tomar providências contra Dercy. “Na sua boca (ou na sua mente enferma), a imoralidade é um culto como outro qualquer.”

Convidar a censura ou a polícia a prestar atenção num artista não era exatamente atitude trivial naqueles meados de 1964. Fazia três meses que o Brasil vivia sob uma ditadura militar. Em 1º de abril, o presidente João Goulart havia sido deposto e uma junta de três militares – o Comando Supremo da Revolução – assumiu o poder. Políticos contrários ao novo regime tiveram os direitos cassados, e, em 11 de abril, um Congresso já devidamente expurgado da “ameaça comunista” – justificativa para o golpe – elegeu o general Humberto de Alencar Castello Branco para a Presidência da República.

Imprensa e televisão foram submetidas a censura prévia do governo. Dercy foi orientada pela direção da emissora a fazer algo que, para ela, era quase impossível: evitar os improvisos. O mais seguro, diziam seus superiores, era que se ativesse ao previamente combinado e tomasse cuidado com a expressão do corpo, em especial das mãos. Um gesto dela que logo seria associado ao cantor Jair Rodrigues – estender e flexionar o antebraço, virando a mão ora para cima ora para baixo – passou a ser tido como pornográfico.

Embora procurasse seguir as recomendações, ela não tinha noção exata da gravidade da situação política do país. No dia da deflagração do golpe, Dercy estava em plena mudança para um apartamento novo, na Rua Tonelero, 180, em Copacabana – o endereço onde, uma década antes, o jornalista Carlos Lacerda, um dos principais adversários de Getúlio Vargas, sofrera um atentado. Ela contaria que, ao ouvir o barulho de fogos que celebravam a chegada dos militares ao poder, pensou que se tratasse de comemoração de gol num jogo de futebol. “Quem ganhou?”, perguntou para Decimar. “Não sei quem está jogando, mamãe”, respondeu a filha. “Mais desligada do que eu”, reclamaria Dercy, tempos depois.

Desligada ou atenta, o fato é que Dercy driblaria, a seu modo, as dificuldades da censura. Trocava palavras proibidas e gestos a serem evitados por olhares e entonação sugestivos. Isso acontecia tanto em Viva vovô Deville como em Dercy beaucoup – um trocadilho com merci beaucoup, ou “muito obrigado”, em francês –, uma espécie de teatro televisionado. O programa, uma comédia em três atos com grande elenco e Dercy como protagonista, era transmitido diretamente do Teatro Excelsior, no Rio. O público que lotava o local para ver, ao vivo, a nova estrela da televisão ria ainda mais das piadas quando notava a ginástica que ela fazia para contá-las, tentando despistar os censores.

Dercy era boa no drible. Mas também era impaciente. Cansada de se cercar de cuidados na Excelsior, começou a prestar atenção na concorrência. Imaginava que, em outra emissora, pudesse ter mais liberdades. Assim, aceitou de pronto um convite de um jovem executivo da TV Rio para jantar. Fazia pouco tempo que Dercy se dera conta da existência daquele rapaz de 29 anos; ele, por outro lado, admirava-a desde o dia em que, menino, a vira na tela do Cine Osasco, cinema que frequentava no então distrito de São Paulo.

Naquele ano de 1943, o garotinho de 8 anos se deliciou com a interpretação de Dercy no filme Samba em Berlim, sua estreia no cinema. Embora ela fosse uma coadjuvante, o menino teve a impressão – da qual nunca se esqueceria – de que a atriz “pulava para fora da tela”.

Apesar da reverência dispensada à artista, José Bonifácio de Oliveira Sobrinho, desde sempre conhecido como Boni, dispensou maiores formalidades ao ir ao seu encontro. Dercy fizera questão de jantar em casa, no apartamento de Copacabana. Ao abrir a porta para receber o executivo da TV Rio, viu que ele tinha as pernas à mostra, e gostou do que viu.

Boni não aparentava ter o poder que tinha quando bateu à porta do apartamento de Dercy. Embora aquele fosse um jantar de negócios, ele vestia bermudas, como se estivesse a caminho da praia. Não foi sozinho. Estava acompanhado de Walter Clark, principal executivo da emissora, que escolheu um elegante terno para a ocasião. Só de vê-lo tão sério e formal, com jeitão de chefe, Dercy antipatizou com Clark.

A decoração do apartamento impressionou Boni. A espaçosa sala de estar era adornada por quadros, como uma pintura a óleo do português José Malhoa, e tinha o piso protegido por tapetes persas e chineses. Cachepôs, jarros e outros objetos em porcelana e cristal finíssimos repousavam sobre mesas de centro e consolos de mogno e jacarandá. Os móveis estilo d. João V, com variedade de curvas e ornamentos, guardavam utensílios em prata de lei, como talheres, candelabros, xícaras de chá e café, além de itens decorativos, a exemplo de galos e pássaros.

Boni notou que Dercy, embora afável, estava na defensiva com Clark. É possível que ela tenha percebido, de antemão, que o executivo se achava “muito esperto”. “A Dercy era muito mais viva do que nós, como logo pudemos perceber”, Clark escreveria, no futuro, em suas memórias. Ele tentou, como pôde, amenizar o desconforto no ar. Encheu-a de elogios, “aquela puxação de saco toda”, em suas palavras. Disse que, na TV Rio, ela teria o talento reconhecido, que a Excelsior a reduzia a uma caricatura, explorando apenas seu lado chulo. “Você pode fazer peças, trabalhos criativos, se comunicar com o público de outra maneira”, continuou Boni, prometendo que, se fosse para o canal 13, ela não seria mais associada à pornografia. “Eu não sei o que é pornografia. Sou o que sou”, ela respondeu. “Você vai ser você, mas não com limites, e sim com acréscimos”, garantiu o executivo, que confessou ter se encantado por ela, desde sempre, por considerá-la diferente das mulheres com quem convivia, quase todas conservadoras.

Dercy não se empolgou com os elogios. Queria saber quanto ia ganhar a mais. “Dercy era absolutamente objetiva e mais mercenária que aqueles tipos que aparecem em filmes do Charles Bronson”, lembraria Walter Clark. Quando a dupla ofereceu um salário de 8 milhões de cruzeiros, quase o dobro do que recebia na Excelsior, ela assinou o contrato para ser a estrela do canal 13. Para aqueles que ficaram surpresos com a mudança, Dercy atribuiu a decisão ao além. Aos jornalistas, contou que certo dia, ao passar em frente ao prédio da TV Rio, ouviu uma voz sussurrar “fique no 13”, e assim fez.

A artista quis tirar férias antes de começar no novo emprego. Como parte das negociações para mudar de emissora, exigiu o pagamento de passagens aéreas e hospedagem para ela e um acompanhante em algum destino fora do Brasil. Após o fim do relacionamento com o ator Rildo Gonçalves – que, ao contrário do que ela previra em entrevistas, não evoluiu para um casamento –, estava de namorado novo, o compositor e futuro diretor de tevê David Raw, paulistano de 38 anos. Boni e Clark sugeriram que o casal passasse as férias no México. Dercy aceitou a proposta. A escolha do destino não foi aleatória. Naqueles tempos, Boni vinha trocando correspondências com o escritor Félix Caignet, autor da novela O direito de nascer, que morava no país. As mensagens eram enviadas por telex, porque Caignet, refugiado cubano na América do Norte, sentia-se mais seguro assim.

O direito de nascer já havia sido veiculada na Rádio Nacional, no Rio, em 1951, e na Rádio Tupi, em São Paulo, em 1952, com enorme sucesso de público. A novela contava a história da jovem Maria Helena, que engravida de um inimigo de seu pai. Contrariado, o pai determina que um de seus funcionários mate o bebê após o nascimento. Sabendo disso, Dolores, uma empregada da família, foge com a criança – um menino, a quem dá o nome de Albertinho – e a cria como se fosse sua. Crescido, Albertinho se forma em medicina e acaba por salvar a vida do avô que encomendara seu assassinato.

Caignet estava disposto a vender os direitos do dramalhão, mas alertou Boni de que o texto havia sido escrito para o rádio – caberia ao brasileiro mandar fazer a adaptação para a tevê. Além disso, cobrava 6 mil dólares por uma cópia da obra: 1 mil oficiais e 5 mil por fora, pagos pessoalmente, em espécie. Se quisesse, era daquele jeito. Como Boni queria muito, convenceu Dercy a sacrificar parte de suas férias no México para fechar o negócio com o cubano.

Dercy pegou o avião no Rio de Janeiro com uma mala abarrotada de notas de 100 dólares, totalizando a quantia cobrada por Caignet. O combinado era que, chegando ao país, ela encontrasse o escritor e seu advogado, entregasse a mala, pegasse a assinatura dos dois no contrato de cessão e recebesse o texto. Com esse roteiro em mente, ela cuidou de guardar o dinheiro em local seguro tão logo se hospedou no hotel. Pediu a David Raw que depositasse as cédulas no cofre do quarto e memorizasse o segredo da fechadura.

No dia do encontro, Dercy abriu o cofre e se deparou com o espaço vazio. Não havia nem sequer uma nota de 100 dólares no compartimento. Desesperada, telefonou para Boni. “Roubaram o dinheiro no hotel”, contou. Ele achou a história estranha. Argumentou que a única pessoa capaz de tirar as cédulas dali seria aquela que soubesse o segredo do cofre. Recomendou que, numa hora em que estivesse sozinha, procurasse a quantia entre os pertences do namorado. Minutos depois, Dercy telefonou de novo para o Rio. Contou ter achado o dinheiro escondido na bainha de uma calça do rapaz. “Filho da puta”, ela desabafou. Reuniu o valor e foi ao encontro do advogado do cubano. Após o susto no hotel, estava cismada com o nome do homem, Ladrón Guevara. “Porra, será que vai dar certo fazer negócio com esse cara?”, perguntou.

Deu. Dercy voltaria para o Brasil com uma mala velha cheia de papéis amarelados, cheirando a “mijo de gato”, como se queixaria a Boni, e a novela iria ao ar entre dezembro de 1964 e agosto de 1965, sendo transmitida pela TV Rio e pela Tupi, em São Paulo. A atriz Nathalia Timberg, então com 35 anos, consagrou-se como estrela da televisão ao dar vida à sofrida Maria Helena. A novela fez tanto sucesso que o episódio final foi transmitido ao vivo do ginásio do Ibirapuera, em São Paulo, e do estádio do Maracanãzinho, no Rio.

O romance de Dercy e David não sobreviveu ao episódio. Os dois desmancharam o namoro e passaram a se relacionar apenas profissionalmente. Findas as férias, Dercy assumiu as funções na TV Rio. As duas emissoras ficavam na Zona Sul: o canal 13, no Posto 6 de Copacabana; o canal 2, em Ipanema. Sua primeira missão seria estrelar a adaptação da peça A dama das camélias para a televisão. Mas, com menos de uma semana na casa nova, percebeu que fizera uma “cagada”, como definiria anos depois. Apesar do salário milionário que oferecera a Dercy, a TV Rio tinha menos recursos que a Excelsior. Os equipamentos eram de segunda mão. As câmeras não podiam ser desligadas, ou não ligavam mais. Faltava gelo-seco e ventilador para fazer fumaça. Quase tudo funcionava na base do improviso. Em determinada ocasião, o próprio Boni, alto executivo do canal, foi convocado para atuar como uma espécie de contrarregra: deitou-se rente ao chão e, abanando um chapéu com vigor, fez ventar.

Desgostosa com aquela emissora que a fazia lembrar os velhos tempos de circo, Dercy procurou o antigo chefe, Carlos Manga, diretor-geral da Excelsior, e disse que queria voltar. Ele topou. Dercy, no entanto, não sabia como dar a notícia a Boni e Clark. Sentia-se em dívida com eles – sobretudo porque a dupla havia aceitado todas as suas exigências, incluindo bancar a viagem romântica (e desastrada) com David Raw. Então achou que era o caso de inventar uma pequena mentira. Internou-se na Clínica São Vicente, no bairro carioca da Gávea, onde já estivera fazendo cirurgias plásticas. Mandou avisar no trabalho e na imprensa que estava muito doente e não poderia retomar as atividades tão cedo. “Dercy encontra-se recolhida a uma casa de repouso”, noticiou o telejornal da Excelsior. “Baixando hospital”, confirmou o Diario de Noticias. Na noite em que deveria levar ao ar a adaptação de A dama das camélias – previamente anunciada pela imprensa –, a TV Rio reprisou uma comédia italiana. Nem todos os jornais, porém, compraram a versão oficial para o sumiço da atriz. “De Dercy Gonçalves, nem sombra. O canal 13 ainda não se convenceu de que a televisão séria é incompatível com certos artistas faltosos?”, protestou o jornal O Globo. “Dercy ausente do canal 13. A notícia é a de que se encontra doente. Não é verdade. Dercy está à procura de uma forma de se desligar da TV Rio”, escreveu o colunista Sérgio Bittencourt, do Correio da Manhã.

Intrigados, Boni e Clark resolveram visitá-la – por uma infeliz coincidência, no exato instante em que Carlos Manga, que sabia de toda a armação, se encontrava na clínica, acertando com Dercy os detalhes de sua volta. Quando a enfermeira anunciou que os dois homens estavam lá, a atriz pediu a Manga que se escondesse no banheiro. Recebeu-os prostrada na cama, esforçando-se para parecer aérea e abatida. Se os chefes faziam alguma pergunta, respondia com um enigmático “Ahn?”, como se de tão debilitada houvesse perdido a lucidez. Do banheiro, ouvindo a cena, Carlos Manga se segurava para não rir alto. 

Quando deixaram o hospital, Boni e Clark sabiam que tinham perdido Dercy. Boni diria ter imediatamente constatado que ela não estava doente e inventara aquilo tudo porque se decepcionara com a TV Rio. Já Walter Clark admitiria ter sido feito de “otário” e “paspalho” pelo “aspecto moribundo” da atriz. Como ela continuasse a faltar às gravações, o contrato com a TV Rio foi cancelado. Boni não se chateou. Entendeu a armação da amiga como um carinho, um cuidado para não magoá-lo. Dali a poucos dias, em setembro de 1964, ela estaria de volta à Excelsior com um salário de 10 milhões de cruzeiros. “Jamais alguém ganhou tanto dinheiro para ir do Posto 6 a Ipanema duas vezes num mês”, ironizou a revista Intervalo. Além de aumentar a remuneração da artista, a emissora concordou em pagar a multa de 17 milhões de cruzeiros pela rescisão do contrato dela com o canal 13.

Com o vai e vem, Dercy tornou-se uma das duas pessoas mais bem pagas da televisão brasileira daquele ano. A outra, igualmente beneficiada pela concorrência entre as emissoras, era o pernambucano Abelardo Barbosa. Ele havia estreado na TV Tupi em 1957 e, desde 1961, apresentava a Discoteca do Chacrinha na TV Rio. Na atração, usava fantasias diversas – marinheiro, gladiador romano, mosqueteiro – e recebia convidados, como as cantoras Dóris Monteiro e Ângela Maria. Também lançava postas de bacalhau e sacos de feijão para a plateia, além de buzinar no ouvido de calouros que se apresentavam – e se humilhavam – em seu programa. A aparência espalhafatosa e o comportamento peculiar de Chacrinha, frequentemente classificado de “grotesco” pela imprensa, renderam-no o apelido de “louco”. “É o louco mais bem pago do país”, definiu a revista Intervalo.

Diferentemente de Dercy, que não teve paciência para a falta de estrutura, Chacrinha se esforçava para driblar a precariedade da TV Rio. Era comum que pagasse o figurino do próprio bolso. Em 1964, no entanto, não resistiu ao convite da Excelsior, que ofereceu a ele um salário quase duas vezes maior para trocar o Posto 6 por Ipanema.

Faturando alto como nunca, Dercy se permitiu um grande luxo. Deu o apartamento da Rua Tonelero para Decimar e comprou um triplex também em Copacabana, para onde se mudou antes do Natal. Vendeu em leilão os móveis antigos – doando o dinheiro a uma entidade de apoio a tuberculosos – e comprou tudo novo. Investiu em sofás de veludo vermelho, espelhos grandes, mesas de madeira, cadeiras em ferro batido e, para forrar o piso de mármore branco de Carrara, tapetes persas com espessura de 3 cm. Enfeitou os ambientes com cortinas brancas, almofadas de pele de onça, relógios, plantas, flâmulas e bolas. “É tudo decoração de Dercy, tá?”, disse à Revista do Rádio, que usou quatro páginas de sua edição de 20 de fevereiro de 1965 para exibir a nova morada da estrela.

Dercy se deixou fotografar sentada na cama (com dois colchões de mola, porque fazia questão de conforto), descendo as escadas em mármore e ferro fundido, e diante de uma máquina de escrever, no escritório. Ao jornalista, explicou que transformou um dos cômodos do segundo andar em quarto de vestir, cujos armários em pau-marfim guardavam, além de roupas e acessórios, encadernações com os scripts de suas peças. Na cozinha, posou para as câmeras encostada na pia, fingindo lavar louça. “As minhas mãos sujas de sabão são apenas uma pose, pois muito pouco apareço por aqui. Cerquei a cozinheira de tanto conforto que lhe dei até um telefone (do meu quarto, peço refeições)”, afirmou.

Os empregados eram as únicas pessoas com quem Dercy dividia os três andares do apartamento de Copacabana. Eventualmente, recebia amigos e jornalistas. No início de 1965, atendeu a jornalista e escritora Nélida Piñon, que trabalhava como editora-assistente dos Cadernos Brasileiros, um periódico do Congresso pela Liberdade da Cultura, movimento intelectual anticomunista fundado na Alemanha em 1950. Nélida demorou a convencer seus superiores de que seria uma boa ideia entrevistar Dercy – ao ouvir a proposta, os jornalistas ficaram escandalizados com a possibilidade de dar espaço para uma atriz desbocada e popular numa revista consumida pela elite cultural. Vencidos pela insistência de Nélida, tiveram que ler, nas páginas que editavam, Dercy declarar que não estava nem aí para eles. “Sei que os intelectuais torcem o nariz para o meu teatro e que não gostam de mim. Mas não me incomodo.” A conversa se desenrolou à beira da piscina, no terceiro andar do apartamento. “Se eu perdesse tudo isso, e de repente ficasse pobre e sem todas essas coisas bonitas, é claro que ia ficar triste”, disse. “Mas não tinha importância, começava tudo de novo e ia tocando para frente.”

Com alguma frequência, Dercy recebia a visita da filha e dos netinhos – Marcelo, com 3 anos, e Flávio, um neném gorducho, careca e risonho que ainda não apagara a primeira velinha. Eram seus dois “homenzinhos maravilhosos”, com quem gostava de passar as horas quando não estava atuando, dando entrevistas ou apostando em casas de jogos. Dercy dizia já ter se conformado em não viver um grande amor, mas reconhecia que não era fácil – e precisava de escapes para lidar com as dores emocionais. “O jogo é um refúgio formidável para as pessoas sofridas. E só as pessoas sofridas é que jogam. É a solidão”, disse, em entrevista para a Manchete.

Apesar dos namoros com colegas de trabalho, ela ainda não se recuperara por completo do fim do casamento com Danilo Bastos. Dizia ter sentido, logo após o divórcio, que lhe faltavam os braços e as pernas. “Depois refleti e disse a mim mesma: ‘Tenho pernas e braços. Tenho que reagir.’” A tristeza, porém, não a impedia de perceber que tivera um relacionamento fracassado e que, racionalmente, não havia motivo para sentir falta dele. “Marido é assim mesmo. Logo depois do casamento é amor, um ano depois é marido, depois vira irmão, depois primo, e depois inimigo. Marido é coisa muito chata, pelo menos comigo foi assim. Fica-se habituada a um inimigo junto da gente.”

Embora conversasse frequentemente com jornalistas, era raro que Dercy se abrisse tanto numa entrevista como fizera para aquela edição de 14 de agosto da Manchete. Foi sabatinada por cinco repórteres, permitindo-se pequenas pausas para fumar. Afirmou, por exemplo, que se julgava apenas “simpática”. “Tempos atrás eu me considerava também antipática, pois tinha um complexo de inferioridade devido ao meu berço, que foi muito brabo. Então eu me sentia amargurada. Mas hoje não, hoje eu me sinto até bem simpática”, reconheceu. Contudo, não conseguia se achar bonita, a despeito da enorme quantia que gastava com Urbano Fabrini, seu cirurgião plástico de confiança. “Bonita não sou, mas faço uma força danada. Não saio do dr. Fabrini. Ele dá um jeito, e vou acabar com 80 anos, os joelhos pelancudos, mas a cara lisa.”

O fato de ter tido companheiros que tentaram se beneficiar financeiramente do relacionamento – como Danilo Bastos e David Raw – talvez explicasse a razão pela qual Dercy, naquele momento da vida, imaginava que a fortuna era seu principal atrativo. “Vejam estes dois brilhantes que tenho no dedo. [...] Os homens olham muito para os meus dedos, para os meus anéis”, contou. “Até hoje não consegui ser amada.” Contou também que, apesar do dinheiro e do sucesso, não nutria orgulho de si. Ao ver o próprio nome nos letreiros da tevê e do teatro, revelou não sentir nada. “É uma pena, porque antigamente eu ficava doida para ver o meu retrato nos jornais. E tive que enfrentar cada coisa para conseguir isso!” Assegurou, no entanto, que não guardava arrependimentos, vergonha do passado ou pudor pelo modo como se comportava. “Foi com a pornografia [...] que eu deixei de passar fome. Então eu quero morrer por-no-grá-fi-ca.” 

Assumir-se pornográfica – e manifestar a intenção de assim permanecer – exigia certa dose de coragem, ou de distração, no momento em que o Brasil vivia sob um governo militar persecutório e guiado por uma moral conservadora. Dercy colecionava atitudes que geravam dúvidas se ela se movia pela valentia, pela falta de noção ou pelo puro desprendimento. 

Um exemplo disso foi a maneira como socorreu o ator Mário Lago, mesmo sendo ele, na época, um artista com reservas a seu estilo. Aos 53 anos – célebre pela autoria da canção Ai que saudades da Amélia, em parceria com Ataulfo Alves, e pela atuação em radionovelas da Rádio Nacional –, Lago não havia acumulado um patrimônio que lhe permitisse parar de trabalhar. Ligado ao Partido Comunista e ao Sindicato dos Radialistas do Rio de Janeiro, foi preso um dia após o golpe militar de 1964. Era casado com Zeli Cordeiro, filha do dirigente comunista Henrique João Cordeiro, e tinha cinco filhos. Quando deixou a prisão, dois meses depois, se achava sem trabalho, sem dinheiro e sem perspectivas de recolocação no mercado. Com medo de represálias dos militares, ninguém se dispunha a empregá-lo. Ninguém, exceto Dercy.

Dias após ser solto, Lago estava em casa, com esposa e filhos, sem saber como alimentaria tantas bocas, quando o telefone tocou. Zeli atendeu e passou para o marido. Era Dercy, convidando Lago para fazer uma ponta num programa dela na Excelsior. O trabalho era diferente de tudo o que ele já tinha feito. Numa das cenas, por exemplo, seria empurrado por Dercy e cairia num sofá. “Dercy, eu tenho um pouco de medo desse estilo que você faz”, assumiu Lago. “Mário, o que interessa é o leite das crianças”, ela respondeu, pragmática como costumava ser. Para convencê-lo a aceitar o trabalho, ofereceu-lhe uma condição especial: ele receberia o pagamento no ato, antes mesmo de entrar em cena.

Mário Lago topou – e entrou no espírito dercyniano de atuar. Ao cair no sofá para onde Dercy o empurrara, enfiou a mão num dos bolsos e dali tirou um maço de notas. Aquele podia não ser seu estilo, mas o leite das crianças estava garantido.

Dercy estava ganhando dinheiro como nunca, o suficiente para “viver bem, sem pensar no futuro”, mas continuava incapaz de recusar trabalho. Em julho de 1964, começou a se apresentar na badalada boate Fred’s, em Copacabana, com a peça Dona Violante Miranda. Como parte dos frequentadores da casa noturna eram turistas, cabia ao maître traduzir as falas e os palavrões de Dercy para os estrangeiros. Ao que consta, o funcionário era impecável na tradução simultânea. Em visita ao Rio de Janeiro para participar do Festival Internacional do Filme, o ator americano Troy Donahue – galã do faroeste Um clarim ao longe – encantou-se pelo espetáculo de Dercy. À revista Intervalo, contou que ela era a atriz brasileira que mais havia chamado sua atenção. “Eu a vi na boate Fred’s, num show divertidíssimo, e achei ótima”, disse. 

Dercy emendou a temporada no Fred’s com outro espetáculo, dessa vez num ambiente mais familiar, o Teatro João Caetano, e ao lado de um velho amigo, Oscarito. A peça que voltou a reunir a famosa dupla de cômicos foi Cocó, my darling..., adaptação de um texto do francês Marcel Mithois (traduzido pela escritora Hedy Maia) que Dercy, como era seu costume, transformou no que quis. “O negócio é o seguinte. É muito monótono ficar repetindo a mesma coisa todo dia, e eu então invento”, disse na entrevista para a Manchete, quando questionada – talvez pela milésima vez – sobre sua mania de mudar os textos que encenava. Reconheceu que os autores ficavam “danados da vida”, mas não ligava nem um pouco, e deu um exemplo de como agia. “Uma vez houve uma onda danada porque eu representava A dama das camélias e não morria em cena. Acontece que eu não estava com vontade de morrer, e pronto. Eu acho que o artista deve representar aquilo que sente. Se ele só faz o que o autor manda, então não é mais artista, é cópia.”

Oscarito andava afastado do palco, dedicado ao cinema, e Dercy fez questão de convidá-lo por achar que o personagem da peça – um velhote atrapalhado, metido em confusões – era perfeito para ele. “Para mim é uma honra”, ele respondeu, “como bom cavalheiro espanhol”, nas palavras dela. A gentileza do amigo era algo que a encantava. Em comum, os dois tinham o talento para o improviso e, em cena, protagonizavam um verdadeiro duelo de cacos. Mas, apesar de partilharem esse traço, tinham grandes diferenças. Oscarito não gostava de falar obscenidades, como a amiga. Também era um homem tímido, de tal modo que, aos olhos de quem não o conhecesse, podia soar como extremamente sério. A genialidade de Oscarito era das raras capazes de paralisar Dercy:

Quando o Oscarito entrava em cena, eu parava e ficava esperando a graça. Porque a entrada dele era muito engraçada, muito circense. E eu não queria nem me mexer pra não estragar o trabalho dele. Eu ficava estupefata, assistindo. Ele era muito carismático. Eu usava o escracho, mas ele era mais circense do que cômico de chanchada, de revista. Nos bastidores, ele era tímido, muito tímido. Mas tinha as respostas na ponta da língua. E muito carisma.

Numa repetição do acontecido na ocasião mais recente em que havia atuado com Oscarito – na peça Quero ver isso de perto, em 1949 –, Dercy enfrentou problemas com a censura. No espetáculo, interpretava uma mulher cujos cinco maridos tiraram a própria vida. O último a se suicidar era um peruano. Num determinado momento, o mordomo anunciava a chegada do embaixador do Peru, interpretado pelo ator Carlos Kurt. Com uma faixa no peito e roupa em vermelho e branco – as cores da bandeira do país –, o homem se confessava admirador da viúva e lhe oferecia uma mesada milionária. Ela então respondia que preferia morrer a se casar outra vez com um peruano.

A cena, que nem era tão engraçada assim, irritou a Embaixada do Peru. Certa noite, momentos antes de começar a peça, Dercy recebeu a visita do chefe da Divisão de Censura de Diversões Públicas, órgão de fiscalização do regime militar, solicitando que não se mencionasse a nacionalidade do embaixador. A atriz concordou com o pedido. O censor que ficou no teatro para conferir se a alteração seria feita não gostou quando viu que o figurino de Carlos Kurt fora mantido. Estabeleceu-se uma confusão, o censor ameaçando autuar Dercy por desacato à autoridade, e a sessão foi suspensa. O espetáculo acabou sendo retomado dias depois, sem citação ao Peru, e mantendo a faixa e as cores do país na roupa do embaixador. “Já cansei dessa prevenção que a censura tem para comigo. Cocó, my darling… voltará ao palco. Não mencionarei a nacionalidade do embaixador. Mas a faixa continua e o texto também”, ela disse.

Ao contrário de Dercy Gonçalves, a comediante gaúcha Ema D’Ávila nunca havia tido problemas com a censura. Também respeitava invariavelmente o texto, gostava da vida no campo e achava que a mulher deveria ser mandada, “quase sempre”. Ao contrário de Ema, Dercy tinha um “fraco artístico” pelos cacos, achava melhor a vida entre os arranha-céus e considerava que, “se a mulher mandasse mesmo, o mundo estaria melhor”.

Em fevereiro de 1966, a Revista do Rádio publicou uma matéria comparando as duas “autênticas e queridas campeãs do humorismo pela tevê”: “Podem ser rivais na conquista do público, mas na vida real estimam-se e respeitam-se.” As duas entraram na brincadeira de representar, de forma caricata, os papéis que a revista havia projetado para cada uma delas. Ema posou para a foto com postura ereta, sorriso calmo, cercada por flores, com elegante camisa de botões e brinco delicado. Dercy, por sua vez, foi fotografada esparramada no sofá, fingindo beber uísque direto da garrafa, os olhos revirados e uma camisa rendada caindo por um dos ombros.

“Detesta Carnaval. Não suporta jiló. Gosta de cozinhar. [...] Jamais xingou alguém”, lia-se sobre Ema. Dercy representava a antítese da colega: “Adora o Carnaval, comparecendo à maioria dos bailes. Diz que jiló com feijoada é uma delícia. Acha que a cozinha não foi feita para ela. [...] Não esconde que todo dia tem motivos para xingar alguém.”

Dercy Gonçalves parecia cada vez mais disposta a corresponder às expectativas depositadas sobre ela. Se esperavam que dissesse palavrões, os mais grotescos sairiam de sua boca. Se queriam frases de efeito, Dercy tinha uma coleção delas. Não era apenas no palco que recorria aos cacos. Na vida, também sabia improvisar. Inventava histórias estapafúrdias a respeito de si – “costumo mentir 24 horas por dia”, disse à Revista do Rádio – e, assim, reforçava a figura da mulher escrachada. Perto de completar 60 anos, avó de dois netos, Dercy estava prestes a consolidar a imagem à qual ficaria associada na posteridade: a da velha maluca, desbocada e indecente.

Trecho da biografia Dercy – a diva debochada, a ser lançada em maio pela Companhia das Letras.