The backlands in four chapters
In January 1999, A Dog’s Will proved that Brazilian television could film popular literature with the grammar of cinema — and become a classroom classic.
Brazilian television always knew how to adapt; it rarely knew how to translate this well. A Dog’s Will, the miniseries directed by Guel Arraes, took Ariano Suassuna’s verse and found an audiovisual equivalent for it: fast cutting, short takes, the timing of popular comedy under the light of the backlands.
Matheus Nachtergaele and Selton Mello make João Grilo and Chicó a double act of millimetric precision, and Fernanda Montenegro gives Our Lady the sweet authority of someone who has seen everything. The final judgement, between the Devil and the Mother of God, became national quotation heritage.
From the schedule into history
Broadcast over four nights in January 1999, the miniseries was re-edited and released in cinemas in 2000 — a rare path, from inside the schedule into the dark room, which says a great deal about the formal ambition of Guel Arraes’s unit.
To revisit it today, on DVD or on the platforms, is to see how much television can do when it treats its audience like the audience of popular theatre: with respect for their intelligence and an appetite for invention. The backlands of Taperoá are still playing, in memory.
Suassuna on the shelf
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