Loveling's reviews
Media reviews
Fotogramas
Powerful and hypnotic interpretation, of a colossal strength. Teles floods with contrasts and nuances a strange, singular and non-transferable life. As every life is, up close. That is, true. The film doesn't have events, it has pieces of poetry torn off life itself.
Variety
A story like this may seem too banal for some audiences, but there's real beauty in the moments Pizzi has chosen to share, including some that don't necessarily advance the narrative but deepen our understanding of the family connections.
The Hollywood Reporter
With robust bursts of primary colors, especially in scenes of the family at the beach, Pizzi and DP Pedro Faerstein use the widescreen frame to vivacious effect, finding something lyrical even in everyday chores. The film is a valentine to working-class Brazilian culture in Petropolis (Pizzi's hometown) and the waterfront town of Araruama, as much as one to motherhood and family bonds.
The Wrap
The proceedings are bolstered by Pizzi's impressive aesthetic vision. Vibrant and potent, 'Loveling' (originally titled 'Benzinho' in Brazil) occasionally plays like an intensified stage play. There's a theatrical nature to the presentation. The sets look contained, almost homespun. Beyond the words exchanged between characters, it's the setting that cements the film. It grounds Pizzi's story in a way that feels authentic and alive.
El País
Pizzi also adds beautiful details of staging and editing, like the formidable musics of contrast, happy for the moments of bitterness, that put complexity in a universe of enormous significance, but exposed with as frankness as simplicity.
El Periódico
The movie contemplates complex questions about the relationships between parents and their children with stunning simplicity but still avoiding to give easy answers, and it's built in a seductive portrait of pleasure and pain, of comedy and tragedy, consubstantial to family life.
Fotogramas
They way Pizzi assembles every shot of everyday scenes is wonderful, with the characters moving along the shot in absolute chaos and freedom and composing an internal choreography as organic as beating. It's one of those movies that ooze life from all its pores, that exude authenticity, light from the shadows.
Cine Premiere
The second film by Gustavo Pizzi and starring Karine Teles is a genuine work with a credible and empathetic interaction among all the members of its cast.
Cinemanía
Without big gestures, without big fights, looking for the detail and the intimacy in this family that gets along so well, of the few moments of solitude of Irene, where everything falls upon her, to the absolute happiness of their beach refuge that they are about to sacrifice to keep going.
Screen Daily
When Irene suddenly binge-eats from the fridge while dancing with her headphones on, however, or inexplicably goes into sudden overdrive trying to clear a house, 'Loveling' indulges its own personal backstory. Certainly, Pizzi gives his former wife Teles the showcase she deserves, although it may be at the expense of credibility.
The Playlist
Where Pizzi's film stutters, though, is in the construction of the narrative. Forward motion is hard to come by. Instead, 'Loveling' is a disparate series of desperate interactions between Irene and her family and Irene and the world. And while the inevitable crescendo does arrive, it doesn't ever feel cohesive with the many threads the film weaves. But maybe that?s the point: life isn't cohesive.
ABC
And that "soft" chromatic and dramatic tone doesn't damage its integrity and veracity at all (all the contrary): it has such a strength to see the family fighting against all the elements (a broken tap, a useless door, enters and exits through the windows...) as well as seeing them in a beach day charged with beach umbrellas, bags, mats and a good mood. And it has a visual and dramatic strength both the adversity and the joy, both of them full of a praise of the everyday life in a raw state.