I expected the worst from “Silvio”, the biopic directed by Marcelo Antunez, with Rodrigo Faro in the role of the businessman and presenter. I imagined that it would be a film dedicated to treating Silvio Santos as a myth, beyond good and evil, like many of the biographies written about him.
Fortunately, the film, which premieres on the 12th, takes a few risks, exploring in a clear and even didactic way a key, not very edifying episode in the life of Silvio Santos: his first marriage, kept secret, for fear that his fans would abandon him.
“One of the unforgivable things I did,” Silvio acknowledged in 1988. “When I remember my wife who died and when I remember that I said I was single… When I remember that I hid my daughters so I could be the heartthrob, so I could be the hero.”
His first marriage, with Maria Aparecida Vieira, with whom he had daughters Cintia and Silvia, is mentioned numerous times in the film, signaling that the hero is human, fallible, capable of causing pain to those closest to him.
Another striking feature of “Silvio” is its lack of concern for historical accuracy. There are many loose ends, chronological leaps and significant omissions from a biographical point of view.
To mention just one example, the film never mentions the word Globo, where Silvio worked for about 15 years. But it recreates a meeting in which executives from the network pressure Silvio in an attempt to change the way the program’s advertising was used.
This scene is necessary to understand Silvio’s desire to have his own TV channel, but an unaware viewer may have difficulty understanding the situation. A sentence about the money Silvio lent to Globo in the late 1960s is also left without any context.
With a script by Anderson Almeida and credited as “screenwriter” to Newton Cannito, who wrote the first version, the film is structured around the approximately seven hours in which Silvio Santos was held hostage, inside his own home, by Fernando Dutra Pinto, on August 30, 2001. While the impasse lasts, Silvio recalls episodes from his personal and professional trajectory.
As is well known, at a certain point in the case Silvio had the idea of asking for the presence of then governor Geraldo Alckmin, to give the kidnapper assurances that he would not be killed. Alckmin, whose name is also not mentioned, was heavily criticized at the time for accepting this role in the case. It was an extraordinary display of Silvio’s power.
The presenter’s entire mythology, reconstructed in flashbacks, emphasizes his extraordinary power of communication and persuasion. The young street vendor, the announcer at Rádio Guanabara, Manuel de Nóbrega’s apprentice, the purchase of the Baú da Felicidade and the help of the then First Lady Dulce Figueiredo, wife of General João Figueiredo, in granting a TV channel.
It is also with his voice that Silvio convinces the kidnapper, played by Johnnas Oliva, to turn himself in to the governor. In the interview he gave to Elias Awad, included in the book “Você Acredita em Mim?”, Dutra Pinto says that Silvio even offered him a job in one of his stores. The author jokes: “All that was missing was an agreement on the salary…”.
Filmed like an episode of a police series for broadcast TV, “Silvio” exaggerates in melodrama, in close-ups of faces and expressions and in the lack of visual imagination. The characters who play the four daughters from the second marriage of Silvio and his wife Íris are luxury extras, taking turns in scenes of crying and anguish.
Faro plays a reserved, circumspect Silvio who almost never smiles. It’s a well-thought-out choice that fits the film, but it may upset fans who treat the presenter as a deity.
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