Greice, a 21-year-old Brazilian girl, studies at Fine Arts University in Lisbon. In the early days of summer, she gets involved with a mysterious guy, Afonso. The couple is accused of a strange accident that occurs at the students’ welcoming night party. Greice needs to return to Fortaleza. Hidden in a hotel, while preventing her mother from discovering the problems in which she was involved, Greice tries to find a place of comfort in the world.
At one point, while the film is still in the beginning, a character explains that “Greice is a friend of the circumstances, she turns lies into truth and writes backwards”. She is referring, of course, to the protagonist who gives Leonardo Mouramateus’ new film its name, but the character can be confused with the film, and Greice also inverts notions of truth and builds itself backwards. As usual in the director’s work, the plot is a complex web of hints, where fact and fiction, subject and gaze, object and representation fuse and confuse. Only that in Greice this game takes on an almost baroque refinement, making everything a sign, hiding the (auto)biography in a labyrinth of mirrors and making everything reflect itself (in a power of infinity – which, in the end, manages to transform the very dual nature of the film’s Portuguese-Brazilian production into a meta-filmic commentary on the director’s condition). Where does the (self-)portrait begin and end? Neither Greice nor Leonardo have the answer, because what interests them is the game of make believe. – Ricardo Vieira Lisboa