“Só tem pastor e programa de bunda”

“You made it!”

Even though he’d invited me to the film screening, my friend seemed genuinely astonished to see me. But this is what I love about not overscheduling myself in Rio: the freedom to blow an entire Monday taking the Metro out to Maracanã, summiting the massive jungle gym that is the main building at UERJ, and watching an hour and a half of Brazilian TV. Rather, watching the film that’s listed in Eduardo Coutinho’s resumé as a “filme inacabado” (a somewhat portentous distinction given that his last “unfinished film” was the landmark Cabra marcado para morrer): Um Dia na Vida.

For the unfamiliar – and I’m guessing that you form the vast majority – here’s a rundown of how they made it. Coutinho’s team chose a day – October 1st, 2009 – set up camp in a television studio, and went to work for 19 hours straight. There were half a dozen monitors tuned to half a dozen basic cable stations: Bandeirantes, TV Globo, Manchete, etc. The recording doohickey (just let me know if the language is getting too technical here) only taped one channel at a time; João and Coutinho essentially channel-surfed for the entire time, suffering through everything from the morning shows to the afternoon novelas to the evening news, infomercials, and beyond. Coutinho suffered through everything, that is; João Salles eventually went to get some sleep, but Coutinho claims (credibly) that “eu não durmo.” From those glorious 19 hours they culled the 90 minutes of television montage that is Um Dia na Vida. That’s why the film can never be shown commercially: “tudo é roubado,” or, as Coutinho put it in a wonderfully pirate-y turn of phrase, “pillaged.”

Seen from one angle, Um Dia na Vida is a parade of the grotesque and absurd. The very first thing – broadcast at around midnight on the morning of the 1st – is a program for learning English in which neither the teacher nor his interlocutor nor the narrator seem to have the firmest of grasps on the English language. It was fantastic. I don’t know the ways of the Brazilian hipster, but the U.S. flavor (at least among those who haven’t abandoned television entirely in favor of semaphore) adores a good dose of terrible TV, and I share that vice. I could have watched the teacher and his friend “Washington” talk about why Washington closed his store yesterday (he was sick, so he stayed at home and watched TV) for the entire 90 minutes. And it just got better. Or worse, depending on how you see it. Tom and Jerry horrifyingly dubbed in Portuguese, a segment on Jesus’ blood type, a woman playing Rock Band and being heckled by an animatronic parrot: it was all gold. 

The film transits between the hilarious and the horrifying – bloodthirsty crime shows, brutal makeovers, incomprehensible evangelical programs, Mexican telenovelas dubbed slapdash and halfheartedly. After a certain point it starts feeling almost like an assault: as Coutinho pointed out after the screening, there’s not a single second of silence in the film. It’s always music or talking, music or talking, music or talking: a barrage of image and sound.

After I recounted a few of the ridiculous things that struck me from the film, a Brazilian friend arched a slightly offended eyebrow and pointed out that you could probably do exactly the same thing with American television. Of course you could! It was like those days in elementary school when you woke up with a fever and, like Washington, just stretched out on the couch for the day too enervated to do anything but take in the increasingly bizarre, comfortingly flickering sights of daytime television. Everything is hideous and wonderful at the same time. But just as American daytime television is the Technicolor nightmare of all of our national eccentricities – and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you evidently haven’t seen the fourth hour of the Today Show – Um Dia na Vida is the distorted face of Brazil. Animatronic parrots and all. So for me, it was riveting anthropological entertainment.

And yet that’s not how Coutinho sees it, necessarily. My ironic, smug occasional appreciation of daytime television has nothing to do with the people who actually watch this TV, the audience for whom all this is constructed. And that’s why Coutinho callsUm Dia na Vida an unfinished film, or just research for a future film: it’s just half the puzzle. He wants to make a documentary about the watchers – the old folks, the maids, the doormen, the service employees, the hospital patients, the housewives. And here I fear that you’ll read this in a note of condescension, but that couldn’t be farther from it. After the screening he grumble-commented that “television is its own best parody” and that children advertising children’s products is “pedophilia,” but Coutinho isn’t interested in making a sneering documentary about the idiots who watch daytime television. The man has a boundlessly compassionate curiosity. While I snicker into my notebook and gasp at awful makeover shows and mystifyingly bad novelas, Coutinho wants to understand why and how these things came to exist. Sem preconceito. Which is why he is a better person than I am.