"I'm a typist, a virgin, and I like Coca-Cola": this is Macabéa, a poor peasant girl from the north of Brazil, summing up her existence in São Paulo, the city to which she, like so many others, has migrated unthinkingly, answering the call of survival. Macabéa is a cross between Fellini's Cabiria and Imamura's insect woman, indomitable in her plainness and her gullibility-the blindness with which she survives the insult that is her life. She's a brilliant character as portrayed by Marcélia Cartaxo (who won the Berlin Film Festival's Silver Bear award for her performance), what director Suzana Amaral calls "a female Charlie Chaplin. She is an anti-heroine, anti-character, anti-everything." Slowly, this girl who barely thinks to wash becomes acclimated to the city, living in a room with three other women (all named Maria), painting her fingernails, riding the subway, making her shy and ultimately absurd first contacts with men and indulging the fantasy life that keeps her alive. When her relationship with the brutish Olímpico-a metal worker who dreams of becoming a politician and can't stand Macabéa for her constant reminder of his own dead-end stupidity-falls prey to the machinations of a honky-tonk fortune teller whose predictions come bizarrely true, the film, as Pauline Kael has written, "completes its trajectory from neorealism to magic realism. Like Umberto D., Hour of the Star has moments of uncanny humor and painful intuition, but at the end it has a plunging happiness that is inseparable from horror." Suzana Amaral raised nine children, studied film in São Paulo and at New York University, and made some forty documentaries and short films before making this first feature, based on a 1977 novella by Clarice Lispector.