Director: Gabriel Mascaro
Year: 2025
This thoughtful film from Gabriel Mascaro proposes a dystopia where retirement has taken on a sinister and compulsory form. 77 year old Tereza – an ungovernable Denise Weinberg, who imbues her with the spirit of someone who’s been patronised for the last time – is not having it, and seeks an escape; at first to scratch off a bucket list item before she’s shipped off, and then to find her own future.
Like so many of the best Brazilian films, O Último Azul is at once a vivid, saturated love letter to the country’s extraordinary landscape and an astute picture of life at ground level for people outside the rarefied elite. Tereza’s journey brings her in league with a tight cast of characters for whom the river – her real co-star – is a way of life, a means of remaining illegible and out of sight, and an escape from other people’s expectations. As an ode to flight from brutal rules and banal reality, it’s fitting that a streak of magical realism shapes the film (and its title).
Mascaro could have laid the dystopia on thick, but it’s more effective that he doesn’t. The fate Tereza runs from is firmly enforced but lightly sketched; a few demeaning details paint a suggestive picture of what lies in wait. There’s enough to create jeopardy, without distracting from the central theme here: the burning human need to control one’s own destiny.
Mascaro also joins fellow Brazilian filmmakers Walter Salles (Central Station), Anna Muylaert (The Second Mother) and Kleber Mendonça Filho (Bacurau, The Secret Agent) in creating really thoughtful, complex and idiosyncratic portraits of older women as they relate to themselves, rather than in contrast with men in their lives – something that sadly still feels precious and rare in the wider ecosystem of filmmaking.
A spoiler-free word about the ending: more than one person I’ve spoken to found it frustratingly abrupt. I thought it was exactly right for where the story takes you. I’ll say no more.
O Último Azul is exquisite; a truly special film that celebrates mischief, self-determination and the pursuit of the unknown.