Capitu

“I don't believe in adaptations,” Luiz Fernando Carvalho wrote of what he called an “approximation” of Dom Casmurro, the foundational 1899 Brazilian novel by Machado de Assis. “Adaptations are always, in a way, a flattening of the work, a murder of the original text.” Rather than naming the hit television miniseries he directed for Rede Globo after the titular nickname of the obsessed protagonist, Bento Santiago, Carvalho named Capitu after Santiago’s wife, the obscure object of his jealous desire. In this 21st-century reinvigoration of Machado’s prescient modernism, Carvalho enters into an unforgettable dialogue with what the author saw as the comic opera of life.

Followed by a Q&A with Luiz Fernando Carvalho