Arrebatador e abominável: o grotesco em Peles, de Eduardo Casanova

Abstract

The film Skins (2017), directed by the controversial film-maker Eduardo Casanova, is populated by deformed characters in search of acceptance. Holding the potential to be perceived as both rapturing and abominable, the work mobilizes contradictory filmic devices, which result in the production of intense affects. This study seeks to discuss the aesthetics that encompass this union of contrasting elements. The theory of the grotesque was employed, centered on the authors Shun-Liang Chao, Michel Chaouli, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Research has shown that the grotesque functions, in the film, as an impulse to subvert melodrama. It attacks, on the one hand, part of its formal and ideological conventions and, on the other, it preserves and enhances what is most fundamental: emotional rapture. The rupture of the classical distance between subject and aesthetic object, carried out through the grotesque and complemented by a fragmentary realism, is productive of both shock and identification with the characters. We argue that the abominable aspect of the film is centered on the grotesque body of the character Samantha, which has an anus instead of a mouth, thus embodying the bodily taboos of deformation and obscenity, as well as the linguistic taboo (asshole) resulting from first two. This bodily configuration can awaken, in the susceptible spectator, the feeling of an imaginary threat linked to the taboo, which we illustrate with examples from anthropology collated by Freud.