As published on CLAUDIA

There is a compliment women are taught to accept with a smile: “Wow, you don’t look your age.” Mariana Xavier has decided to answer it with a question. “But what am I not supposed to look like?” she asked me when we spoke about Marido de Aluguel, her new comedy. At 46, she no longer wants to thank people for thinking she looks younger. She wants to know why we still have such a hard time accepting what women over 40 actually look like, how much energy they have, and how much they still want from life.

The conversation actually began with Alice, her character in the film, written and directed by Paulo Fontenelle and opening in Brazilian theaters on September 24. Alice is broke after her ex-husband is arrested for embezzlement, struggling to keep the huge house where she lives with her daughter, and ends up hiring Vadeco, the “husband for hire” played by Maurício Manfrini. When the ex escapes from prison, what was already complicated turns into a deliberately absurd chain of disasters.

It is unapologetically broad, physical comedy. Fontenelle once described the movie to Mariana as “a cartoon with real people,” a definition she loved. Mariana came up with another one: a mixture of Home Alone and Weekend at Bernie’s. And that is exactly the spirit of it. Doors are slamming, people tripping, bodies being hidden, plans going spectacularly wrong, and that wonderful feeling that everything can always get just a little worse.

Ironically, Mariana told me she was actually trying to move away from this kind of work when she accepted the film. She wanted different registers, different characters, a chance to step outside the comedy box. But she also discovered that she missed playing.

These days, she is an actress, producer, entrepreneur, speaker, and also responsible for creating her own content on social media. She summed it up beautifully: sometimes she gets tired of herself.

“Sometimes all I want is to just be an actress,” she said. To arrive on set and find the script already written, the costume already chosen, the makeup ready, the director directing, everyone doing their job, while she gets to do what made her choose this profession in the first place: lend her body and voice to someone else’s story. “I can live several lives in a single lifetime.”

Alice gave her that opportunity, but she also brought something that now feels even more important. For the first time, Mariana plays the mother of a teenager, played by Letícia Braga. For an actress who spent years associated with Marcelina in Minha Mãe É uma Peça, occupying this new space also means asking audiences — and the industry — to update the image they have of her.

Mariana loves what Marcelina represented in her career and knows people will always recognize her because of that character. But that story began filming in 2012 and ended painfully with Paulo Gustavo’s death. She has to move forward. “I’m 46 years old. I want to do other things, and I need to do other things.”

Which brings us back to “you don’t look your age.”

Mariana believes she has already lost roles precisely because she did not fit someone else’s idea of what a woman her age should look like. And her question dismantles the whole logic of it: if she is 46 and this is her face, her body, her energy, why shouldn’t a 46-year-old character look exactly like her?

Maybe the problem was never that Mariana “doesn’t look 46.” Maybe our image of 46 is the thing that got stuck in the past.

The conversation inevitably reaches menopause. Mariana is now an ambassador for Instituto Menopausa Feliz, and she told me that while filming Marido de Aluguel, in the middle of Rio’s summer, doing highly physical scenes in warm clothes, she had not yet realized she was going through perimenopause and was not receiving hormone replacement therapy.

Today, she talks about it naturally and often repeats a line from gynecologist Juliana Risso that deserves to be heard far more often: menopause marks the end of a woman’s reproductive years, not her productive ones.

Perhaps that is why Alice came along at exactly the right time. She is a woman who has taken an enormous fall. She is in debt, she was betrayed by the man she trusted, she is raising a daughter, trying to maintain a house she can no longer afford, and she keeps going.

Not because she is some superhero impervious to suffering, but because she is still able to find humor in places where there seems to be nothing funny left.

Mariana has also spent the past four and a half years touring Brazil with her one-woman show Antes do Ano Que Vem, in which she plays seven characters. In December, the production will make its first international tour in Portugal. She talks about theater the way people talk about home. Staying on stage, she says, is “watering my roots so they remain strong.”

By the end of our conversation, I realized that Alice and Mariana meet precisely in that place. They are two women for whom moving forward does not mean pretending nothing happened, but refusing to allow what happened to determine where their stories are supposed to end.

And perhaps that is also why Marido de Aluguel works so well right now. Not every piece of art needs to confront us, provoke us, or emotionally dismantle us. Sometimes it can simply offer us a dark movie theater, some popcorn and ninety minutes of beautifully executed nonsense.

Mariana remembered something Paulo Gustavo used to say: laughter is an act of resistance. In times this bitter, perhaps it really is.