The mirror effect Luciano, a young man who allows himself to be arrested to save his mistress, the owner of a burned-out brothel, gets out of prison and becomes a chauffeur for a rich and strange woman, Alfreda. Alfreda dreams of seeing the Virgin Mary and talking to her. With the help of the scientist Heschen Alfred finds more and more correspondences between Mary and herself: it turns out that Mary was rich, the color of Mary’s hair is similar to the color of Alfreda’s hair, she arranges weddings, remembering Mary at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. Not immediately or directly Oliveira conveys the meaning of the enchantment of Alfreda with his dream. At first, it seems that all the characters of the film are concerned only with the quirks of Alfreda, play a service role.
It is only when Alfreda falls into a coma that her sister discovers the secret that Alfreda wanted to see Maria to overcome the mirror effect that is time. This phrase changes the perception of the film. In the mirror, what is behind us, we see ahead. The past is in the future. Therefore, Alfreda in his religiosity does not commit acts of love for his neighbor (even the territory of the estate for weddings she rents, and does not provide free of charge), so she does not allow herself to love her husband with ordinary marital love. She used to see herself in the mirror and the past instead of the future. But it’s hard for her to think that she’s infertile—perhaps because of the sterility of her marriage, a topic Oliveira politely skirts. Therefore, fulfilling a childhood dream that would become something new, not just a reflection of the past in her upcoming life, the long-awaited appearance of the Virgo would be for Alfreda a breakthrough from the past - to the present and unpredictable future. We do not know why Alfreda fell into a coma, whether because she saw Mary or because she looked into the mirror of the past and approached the infancy and non-being. This is the uncertainty principle mentioned in the film. Oliveira has dealt with the “principle of uncertainty” before, say, in Benilde.
The fate of Alfreda deciphers minor oddities in the behavior of other characters. Alfreda’s gardener does not plant flowers because the lilac reminds him of the lilac varnish that young girls began to use. Alfreda's husband hires teachers and buys tools to teach the poor to play music, but all his students make noise. Luciano loves a girl (perhaps an imaginary one) who is married to another. His Camila, he claims, "could have been in a nightclub and slept in her father's house at the same time - although she did not." In a brothel fire, Camila's husband dies, he is also the lover of the hostess, Vanessa, Luciano's mistress. Maybe Luciano set up the fire. Perhaps Camila is just a wonderful double of Vanessa, who escapes after a fire. Luciano, like Alfreda, is fascinated by the dream of his past. The prison director breeds cacti that bloom once in his lifetime, and it is "like a vision." Because of the mirror effect, the dream of the past lives like the expectation of an unprecedented, unique future.
Does the future come with Alfreda’s death, or does the past continue? Oliveira gives us a restrained-optimistic answer: we see children playing well with a small orchestra in the house of a widowed husband. And Luciano seems to solve the mystery of time, this "magic mirror."
8 out of 10