‘If I Were Alive’ Berlinale Review: Close Encounters in Minas Gerais

Somewhere between realism and science fiction, between the most down-to-earth slice-of-life observation and the most extravagant flights of imagination, lies a wide aesthetic gap—one that cinema has often struggled to bridge. A number of Brazilian filmmakers have ventured into that terrain in recent years—Adirley Queirós did so memorably in White Out, Black In—with unsettling and intriguing results. The latest to join that lineage is André Novais Oliveira, the Minas Gerais–born director behind such fine films as She Comes Back on Thursday and Temporada. In If I Were Alive, Oliveira remains faithful to the small-town minimalism that defines his work, chronicling a few days in the life of Gilberto and Jacira, a couple in their seventies who have been together for half a century.

Before settling into that present-day routine, however, Oliveira offers what feels like a teaser for what’s to come: an opening set in the 1970s, when Gilberto was a lovestruck teenager rehearsing with friends for a serenade meant for Jacira. He wants to apologize for something left deliberately vague. Jacira ignores him—the neighborhood, on the other hand, doesn’t, and not kindly—until she sees him spending hours asleep on a bench in the rain, waiting for her. That’s when she finally steps outside, invites him to a funk dance, and the two reconnect. A love story begins, only to suddenly leap forward fifty years.

That jump comes with an unsettling twist. As the film moves from one era to the next, a strange beam of light envelops the couple, as if they were being transported through time. In the present, Jacira (played by celebrated Brazilian writer Conceição Evaristo) and Gilberto (Norberto Novais Oliveira, the director’s father and a recurring presence in his films) are a charming elderly couple, fully attuned to each other’s complaints, routines, jokes, and habits. Each knows exactly what the other will say or do. Much of their time revolves around health issues—doctor’s appointments, cholesterol levels, blood sugar. Gilberto seems far more concerned with all of it. Jacira, much less so.

The one quirk that truly sets Gilberto apart is his obsession with UFOs and extraterrestrials, a fixation his wife can’t quite comprehend. What Gilberto, in turn, can’t accept is Jacira’s refusal to see a doctor when she feels unwell, insisting she’s fine. No one—not even the couple’s adult daughter—can persuade her otherwise. That is, until things become more complicated and reality demands action. It’s at that point, in a wholly unexpected way, that science fiction returns with renewed force, pushing the film into territory no one could have anticipated.

Oliveira handles this tonal balancing act with remarkable assurance, moving from the slow, unhurried everyday life of a couple that operates at its own gentle pace to the eccentric, surprising intrusion of elements drawn from classic genre cinema. Like a Brazilian cousin of Richard Dreyfuss’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Gilberto is obsessed with something everyone else considers absurd—though it may not be. The crucial difference is that here we’re never quite sure how much of what we’re seeing belongs to reality and how much to his imagination.

Kleber Mendonça Filho explored a similar collision between political realism and pure cinematic fantasy in the recent The Secret Agent. These kinds of hybrids and fusions are increasingly common in contemporary auteur cinema, as filmmakers seek to move beyond the strictly observational modes that dominated the early decades of this century. In his own quiet, deeply personal way, Oliveira is doing just that: telling a story about love, companionship, and even loss, while tapping into the most generous and humane possibilities of imagination.