Lilian M.: Relatório confidencial

A wife and mother from the provinces travels to the big city to get away from her oppressive domestic life and begins to explore her newfound freedom, starting by changing her name from Maria to Lilian. The idea of the sexually liberated woman in 1960s and 1970s Brazil had certainly not been treated extensively in film (the exoticised and much too simplistic Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands came the following year).
Reichenbach doesn’t approach a taboo subject didactically or exploitatively, his 'tragicomedy of adventures' recalling Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1968) in its liberal assortment of stories and colourful personalities that veer in and out of the film. At its centre, Lilian M. is about the awakening of different forms of consciousness: from simple family life to a multiplicity of relationships, from agrarian politics to urban politics, and the complex nature of survival in all its shades.