A remarkably unremarkable role
One actress attending the Palm Springs International Film Festival hopes her movie will do more than entertain — she wants it to be a positive step for transgender people everywhere.
Maria Clara Spinelli is one of the stars of the Brazilian film “Paulista,” which follows three people plunging into love.
Their stories intersect in their apartment building on Paulista Avenue, located in the heart of São Paulo, a throbbing, fast-paced, diverse city.
Director Roberto Moreira, visiting Palm Springs for the first time, said he wants filmgoers to leave with the message that, “To find love, you need to break your illusions.”
Spinelli plays Suzana, a buttoned-up lawyer who tentatively opens her heart to another attorney. In the end, her lover cannot resolve the fact that Suzana was once a man.
It is a courageous role in that Spinelli, who herself has made the voyage from male to female, makes Suzana completely unremarkable.
She is not played for shock value. She is not torn about her identity. She is not exploited.
She is simply a woman who wants to be loved.
“That’s what makes the character so fascinating,” Spinelli said, with the help of a translator. “She is a paradox. The fact is that she’s a transsexual, but she’s the most conservative one in the film. People assume that she would be the flamboyant, overly sexual one, and it is not so.
“The fact that she is a transsexual is just one part of her. She is so much more than that.”
Her performance recently garnered a best actress award from the Paulinea Film Festival in Brazil.
Spinelli was floored, considering she didn’t think the award committee would even accept a transsexual in the category for best actress.
“It made me extremely happy and very thankful that they trusted me and believed in my talent,” she said. “This is about acting, not about who I am.”
The director said such a thing has never happened before in his country.
“Brazil is a very open-minded, sexual country, but there is a certain amount of Latin machismo that is difficult to overcome,” Moreira said. “The political implications are huge.”
Moreira, who also wrote the script, said his goal was to create a movie that goes a step further than typical gay drama.
“There is a transsexual, but this is not focused on should she get the (gender reassignment) surgery or not. For the lesbian, it’s not a coming out story. We are beyond that,” he said. “This a story of ‘how do I live? How do I love?’ Those are universal themes that everyone can relate to.”
