The Eye of the Salamander (2024)

The Eye of the Salamander

To put it bluntly, Alex Carvalho’s first full length film shown at the Venice Film Festival’s International Film Critics’ Week, The Salamander, this year is a bad movie. It is written by its director and tells the story of Catherine (Marina Foïs), a French woman in her early fifties who goes to Brazil to find her sister (Anna Mouglalis) and perhaps peace.

The protagonist is torn between the wish to run away, her sibling’s pressure and years spent nursing her father until his recent death. But everything will change with an accidental encounter. On the sand she meets Gil (Maicon Rodrigues), a local bartender in his twenties who approaches her under the pretext of inviting to a party happening that night in the club where he works.

After several sentences and despite not speaking each other’s languages, Gil starts flirting with Catherine and convinces her to spread sun cream on his backside. This very scene shows how weak both the script and mise-en-scène are. The main character begins to trust somebody completely unknown just because he is good-looking.

Very soon it becomes a foregone conclusion: they hardly talk but get along like a house on fire having sex multiple times (with various degrees of explicitness). Meanwhile, her sister keeps warning about not trusting him hoping that after some “holiday fun” she will eventually wake up. But it does not happen like this at all Catherine falls head over heels for this enigmatic guy who only leads her deeper into trouble before getting involved into some kind of shady business with a house.

All characters appear quite despicable since all their actions are driven solely by personal gain or self-interests; however this film does lack certain amount of cynicism, satire or any other plot device that would justify presence many heartless individuals thus even more alienating viewers from already slow moving storyline. Eventually we cannot sympathise either with Catherine who undoubtedly is a victim but acts highly naïvely all way through. We do not really understand why she wants to spend father’s entire inheritance on buying abandoned property in order to open bar there and build life with this man whom she cannot even speak with.

The last third of the film, which should reveal what does Gil want and how does he really feel, becomes even more messy and patchy than before. There is some pathos and compassion in the last meeting between two leads but again dynamics leading up to it as well as its staging are exaggerated.

There might have been an attempt at telling very carnal story based on subverting traditional power relations between coloniser/colonised. This idea could have worked were it not for underwhelming performances combined with weak characterisation thus making such layer hardly noticeable in terms of narrative construction.

There are a lot of questions that go unanswered or aren’t addressed at all. Why does she keep getting worse? Why won’t her sister help her? Where did they grow apart? What makes Catherine so in love with Gil, willing to lose everything but their sexual tension? How can you not be scared by his dark past after finding out he’s always running and being looked for by strangers? Any one of these answers would have made Carvalho’s debut way more interesting.

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