THE STORY – Brazil, 1884. Tita, Muanda, Lena and Francisca, handmaidens to four pupils at a countryside boarding school, dream of freedom just to make it through the day. When an ill-advised romance puts Lena’s life in danger, their dreams of escape become a matter of necessity, and the four girls decide to run away. Their mistresses discover the plan – and to their surprise, insist on coming with them. The group takes shelter in an abandoned ranch house, where they face the challenges of their uncomfortable cohabitation. Freed from the traditional power structures, the Black girls savour agency, love and the possibility of a future on their own terms. Meanwhile, the whites resist learning to do the household chores and to look after themselves, and fail to answer for their own mistakes. When danger catches up with them all, they have to stand together in order to survive.
THE CAST – Alana Cabral, Ágatha Marinho, Dhara Lopes, Maria Ibraim & Duda Batsow
THE TEAM – Karen Suzane (Director) & Clara Ferrer (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 89 Minutes
Rewriting history has become one of contemporary cinema’s most familiar gestures. In an era increasingly attentive to questions of representation, power, and erasure, returning to the past to recover silenced perspectives often feels less like a choice than an obligation. Yet political urgency does not automatically translate into narrative or aesthetic rigor. Between the desire to correct historical absence and the demands of dramatic construction, a fault line frequently opens. “Quatro Meninas,” the debut feature by Brazilian filmmaker Karen Suzane, unfolds squarely within this tension, revealing how easily a counter-hegemonic ambition can slide into simplification.
Set in rural Brazil in 1884, just before the formal abolition of slavery, the story follows four Black domestic workers: Tita (Ágatha Marinho), Muanda (Alana Cabral), Lena (Dhara Lopes), and Francisca (Maria Ibraim). Their lives are structured by labor, obedience, and the omnipresent threat of punishment. Violence rarely announces itself directly, but it inhabits every gesture, every routine, every glance. Freedom, in this context, exists first as speculation, as something imagined rather than attainable. Only when Lena’s secret romantic involvement places her in immediate danger does escape cease to be fantasy and become a necessity.
Up to this point, the narrative adheres to a clear and compelling historical logic. The fracture emerges with the decision to fold four white girls from the same household into the escape. What appears designed as a gesture of narrative symmetry quickly becomes the film’s central conceptual vulnerability. Gendered constraint and racial enslavement are placed side by side as if they occupy comparable registers of oppression, without sufficient interrogation of their structural incompatibility. The result is not productive friction but a smoothing over of difference, a symbolic leveling that substitutes moral intent for analytical clarity. The abandoned ranch where the group takes refuge is imagined as a neutral zone, a space removed from institutional oversight in which inherited hierarchies might unravel. It is here that the film gestures most explicitly toward coexistence, solidarity, and shared survival. Yet this space remains largely conceptual. Conflicts arise but dissipate before they can deepen. Relationships are suggested, sometimes tenderly, but rarely allowed to evolve into something transformative. The promise of reinvention lingers, but the narrative settles instead into stasis.
This hesitation is especially apparent in the treatment of the Black protagonists. Despite their ostensible centrality, they are rendered more as carriers of meaning than as fully articulated subjects. Their desires, disagreements, and inner contradictions are muted in favor of a collective symbolism. In attempting to honor them, the script paradoxically confines them, stripping away the messiness that would allow them to exist beyond emblem. Survival becomes an abstract virtue rather than a lived, contested process. But the white characters fare even worse. Their motivations for abandoning privilege are thinly sketched, their emotional arcs largely unearned. They function less as individuals than as narrative instruments, necessary to sustain the film’s conceit but insufficiently grounded to justify their presence. As a result, the film’s claims to shared experience and mutual transformation ring hollow. Power, though invoked, is rarely examined as something dynamic or contested.
Compounding these issues is a pronounced thematic overreach. Questions of race, gender, queerness, religion, and class circulate throughout the narrative, but seldom with depth. These elements appear less as points of inquiry than as signals of political alignment, markers meant to reassure rather than unsettle. The accumulation of themes doesn’t produce complexity; instead, it dilutes focus, leaving each strand underdeveloped. So, the same restraint persists. The direction avoids confrontation, favoring a careful, almost cautious tone. Violence is withheld, which in itself is not a flaw, but here it results in an aesthetic softening that risks distancing the viewer from historical reality. The past becomes a textured backdrop rather than a force that presses insistently into the present. The desire for accessibility overrides the willingness to provoke discomfort.
The performances offer moments of grounding. Marinho lends Tita a quiet steadiness, while Ibraim imbues Francisca with a fragile warmth that hints at emotional depth beyond the script’s reach. Lopes and Cabral bring sincerity to their roles, navigating narrow confines with restraint. Still, performance alone cannot supply what the narrative withholds: evolution, contradiction, consequence. What ultimately emerges is a work that speaks more eloquently to contemporary longings for reconciliation than to the historical conditions it seeks to examine. “Quatro Meninas” leans toward harmony where rupture might have been more honest, toward symbolic balance where imbalance is the point. The impulse to reclaim silenced histories is palpable and necessary. The readiness to confront their full complexity is not.
The result is a piece shaped by admirable intentions but constrained by caution, a cinema of assertion rather than inquiry. In reaching for universality, it loses specificity. In seeking gentleness, it forfeits urgency. And in attempting to heal, it neglects to fully reckon with what remains unhealed.
