Borges Film – A intrusa (1979)

A intrusa
The Intruder

1979, Brazil, 100 min.

Crew
Directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen.
Produced by Carlos Hugo Christensen.
Screenplay by Carlos Hugo Christensen.
Cinematography by Antônio Gonçalves.
Music by Astor Piazzolla.

Cast
Maria Zilda — Juliana
José de Abreu — Cristiano
Arlindo Barreto — Eduardo

Synopsis

Two brothers, nineteenth-century gauchos Cristiano ​​and Eduardo Nilsen, live a rough life among the cattle, gamblers, and whores of the Uruguaiana pampa. Their relationship is challenged when Cristiano brings home a woman named Juliana. At first, she is treated little more than a household slave; but as she becomes an intimate part of the brothers’ sexual lives, she becomes the catalyst of a secret desire.

Comments

Born in Argentina, Carlos Hugo Christensen moved to Rio de Janeiro and established a reputation as a Brazilian filmmaker. His career was quite eclectic, and included horror movies, westerns, and police dramas; but when he freely adapted Borges’ “The Intruder” as an erotic western, he made his most famous—and controversial—film. A tale of two brothers who finally realize their incestuous passion, A intrusa shocked audiences upon its release in 1979. With its sparse dialogue and focus on intimate sex, the film became the subject of intense debate—was it softcore porn, transgressive erotica, or a liberating act of cinema? A intrusa won several awards at the Gramado Film Festival in Brazil, but was promptly banned in Argentina.

According to Chaco 4ever Books in Argentina, who wrote about A intrusa for Abe Books:

Christensen filmed a lot and varied, both in Argentina and Brazil, but his best films share a peculiar characteristic: they do not resemble anything that others were doing in that same place and time. The same goes for A intrusa, which does not recognize affiliations in its way of representing a minimal incident that Borges’s prose hardly suggests. His audacity led to a total ban in Argentina, which lasted until the return of democracy at the end of 1983. The controversy over the greater or lesser fidelity of adaptation, at this point, does not matter to anyone. What remains is the style that Christensen invented for this film, a way of thinking about time and landscape and the weight of both on the protagonists. The dialogues are few and brief: Christensen does speak, instead, to light, wind and bodies, in two of the most expressive sex scenes of all Latin American cinema. The intrusion of the title barely manifests itself in all the footage, but Christensen is more generous with it than Borges himself, and invents a masterful scene, near the end and with an insect, which is emotional and ominous at the same time.

Argentine filmmaker and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky is less effusive in his book, Borges In/And/On Film:

Speech is the most interesting feature in the version of “La intrusa” made by a veteran Argentine director, active in Brazil for over thirty years by now. The accents of Rio Grande do Sul—bringing Brazilian Portuguese closer to Argentine Spanish, with the odd word of Spanish for aspects of everyday life and work on the plains—add a whiff of interest to this dismaying attempt at a dignified soft-core reading of the Borges story, whose homosexual subtext is ludicrously enhanced: at one point in their very academic “threesomes,” both made-up and shampooed as if for a wild-life cigarette ad, brutally push aside the woman to go about their own business.

I’m not sure why Cozarinsky focuses on the gay subtext as opposed to the incest, but he was clearly not a fan of “wild-life” cigarettes or, ostensibly, shampoo!

Additional Information

A intrusa
You can watch the entire film on YouTube. [Portuguese]

Piazzolla Score
You can read about Piazzolla’s score on the “Borges and Music” Astor Piazzolla pages. The MP3 files are also available for downloading!

IMDB Page
The Internet Movie Database features a brief profile of A intrusa. 

Wikipedia Page
Wikipedia hosts a page on A intrusa. 

Portal Brasileiro Page
An informative page on Carlos Hugo Christensen and A intrusa, it’s worth running through Google Translate. Much of my information on this film comes from this piece. [Portuguese]

Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 5 August 2024
Borges Film Page: Borges & Film
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