A man and two women lost at sea in a drifting small boat while remembering their past via flashbacks…
Sometimes cited as the greatest of all Brazilian films, this 120-minute silent experimental feature by Mário Peixoto, who never completed another film, was seen by Orson Welles and won the admiration of everyone from Sergei Eisenstein to Georges Sadoul. Its musical score include Eric Satie, Claude Debussy, Alexander Borodin, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Maurice Ravel and César Franck. The unusual structure has kept the film in the margins of most film histories, where its been known mainly as a provocative and legendary cult film.
According to the director, Limite is meticulously precise as invisible wheels of a clock, where long shots are surrounded and linked by shorter ones as in a planetary system. Peixoto characterizes his film as a ‘desperate scream’ aiming for resonance instead of comprehension. It shows without words and without analysis. It projects itself as a tuning fork, a pitch, a resonance of time itself, capturing the flow between past and present, object details and contingence as if it had always existed in the living and in the inanimate, or detaching itself tacitly from them. Since Limite is more of a state than an analysis, characters and narrative lines emerge, followed by a probing camera exploring angles, details, possibilities of access and fixation, only then to fade out back into the unknown, a visual stream with certain densifications or illustrations within the continues flow of time. According to Peixoto, all these poetic transpositions find despair and impossibilities; a luminous pain which unfolds in rhythm and coordinates the images of rare precision and structure.