Limite

A wordless spiral of memory, decay, and the dream of escape—Limite is not a film you watch, but a coastline you vanish into.

If Limite, which was written and directed by Mário Peixoto, has any modern descendant, it might be David Lynch’s Inland Empire—another sprawling, elliptical descent into the internal landscape of the haunted. Both films exist outside the architecture of traditional narrative. They circle, double back, dissolve. Faces appear, vanish, reappear in a different light. Time doesn’t pass, it folds. In Inland Empire, Laura Dern drifts between lives like a signal trying to reach a receiver. In Limite, we never even get the signal—just the static, and the uneasy feeling that something has already gone terribly wrong. Both films trap you inside someone else’s dream and leave you there.

Limite is a film that unspools over nearly two hours, a fever dream of egresses and exits—the camera panning in scopophiliac obsession over the crowns of heads, into the gaping maw of laughing mouths, across the round, cranking surfaces of antique camera handles and the wheels of old sewing machines. It has no plot. It begins in the liminal conveyance of a boat. Two women, one of them seemingly dead beneath the boards, or simply sleeping, and others as lost, confused, and—having found themselves inside this unfurling dream—as desperate to reach the opposite shore as any soul adrift.

The next scene: we are entering a door, a gateway by which the viewer is led on a labyrinthine journey into the seeming meaninglessness of experience. The camera catches somnambulistic people from a bird’s-eye view—ambling insects in a perfect environment, so clean and beautiful and without population or corruption it could be a department store diorama of a world. And in existential despair, these men and women wander, slowly, as if under the spell of a hypnotist, through arcane doors, their attempts at egress barred by sleeping men—fellow dreamers—on ladders. The camera lingers, inexplicably, on a basket. Why? we ask ourselves. Is this collection of vaguely connected incidents and occurrences infused with deeper meaning? Or is the director simply playing a game with us?

At times it feels like Meshes of the Afternoon by way of Un Chien Andalou, or some lost reel from Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. But Limite is quieter, more vaporous. Deren carved mirrors into mazes, Buñuel slashed at the eye of meaning, Cocteau walked through it—but Peixoto simply lets it dissolve. The film floats in a more fragile space—less narrative than neurological, a chain of reflexes masquerading as memory.

We are treated to a quick respite from the unending crawl of strange, insectile forms across the stone surface of this city of dreams. An audience of laughing mouths is seated, watching Chaplin make his way through the dirt, tunneling upward, while Mack Swain plays a rather large—and certainly violently unamused—prison guard in this putative cinematic jailbreak. Mouths open, revealing bad teeth, guffawing in unison to see the Little Tramp emerge like a mole from the sand. What is the director implying? That the very idea of escaping our personal prisons—represented by the vast, dwarfing environments endured by the nameless figures who populate this film—is itself a laughable, comic ideal? These mouths could be said to be an egress too—but a killing place, from which erupts both the reflex of mirth and the biting capacity to crush, to chew, to swallow, to digest.

The landscape of the film—its scenic oceans and jungle vistas, its dizzying cliffsides and low horizons—is punctuated by an ending in a cemetery. Men and women have entered the frames and disappeared, and now a man sits at a headstone, smoking, apparently contemplating. Another man approaches, and they contemplate each other, smoke together. We get close-ups of backs, crooked arms, elbows—postures of resignation. The body unfolds in geometries of despair. (How’s that for a Ballardian sentence?)

When the film finally concludes, we are no closer to understanding it than we would be had we traversed its nearly two hours of drifting images within the context of a nocturnal sojourn. One is tempted to think of it as an exercise in style over substance, as if the director were simply testing a massive quantity of film stock, pointing his lens anywhere and everywhere—at whatever he could trap in his own personally edited moments of time. The film presents us with a gateway, and, at the end, we’re left with the image of a man lying inert, perhaps dreaming, perhaps dead—and we ask ourselves, Why are we here? And it is a question not merely directed at the progression of a very strange, but never dull, cinematic experience.

It is the kind of film that doesn’t answer questions—it asks them silently, like waves brushing against a hull in the dark, again and again, until you’re no longer sure if you ever wanted to reach land at all.

Limite - 1931 - Mário Peixoto - 1080p

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