Afinal, o que Querem as Mulheres?: Luiz Fernando Carvalho's Metafictional Critique of Brazilian Television Fiction

Abstract

Although perhaps best known outside Brazil for the feature-length film Lavoura Arcaica (To the Left of the Father) (2001), the majority of Luiz Fernando Carvalho's professional activity has been in television, where he has directed a number of commercially successful and critically acclaimed telenovelas, mini, and microseries. In Afinal, o que Querem as Mulheres? (After All, What do Women Want?) (2010), the director's first original screenplay for television, Carvalho lays bare his assessment of the audiovisual field by constructing a work of metafiction that is simultaneously a critique of Brazilian television fiction and an example of what an artistically engaged alternative might look like. With the intention of synthesizing Carvalho's position and his aesthetic project as they pertain to the broader field of Brazilian television production, this article analyzes select aspects of Afinal, o que Querem as Mulheres?, highlighting instances of the director's use of non-traditional narrative devices and the microseries as a metafictional critique of standardized Brazilian television fiction.