Two Sisters, Separated By Hardship, Long To Reconnect In 'Invisible Life'
In this unabashedly melodramatic, "intermittently gratifying" tale, two sisters in 1950s Rio de Janeiro follow their separate dreams, not knowing they live close to one another.
A melodrama to its high-strung core, Karim Aïnouz's is rich in outsized emotions, most of them pouring out of two devoted young Brazilian sisters forcibly separated through the multiple follies of their authoritarian father. If love — sisterly, carnal, maternal, you name it — blazes on the front burner of this intermittently gratifying tale (based on a 2005 novel by Martha Batalha) of domestic woe, destructive patriarchy marches right
