The most striking departure of Carvalho’s adaptation is its narrative structure. Dom Casmurro is famously filtered entirely through the perspective of the elderly, bitter Bentinho, who retroactively constructs his wife’s betrayal. Carvalho dismantles this monopoly on memory. The miniseries opens with Capitu’s own voice, her gaze fixed directly at the camera—and thus at us. By giving Capitu a point of view and a confessional space, the director immediately establishes the series as a counter-narrative. This is no longer the story of a man who “may have been” cuckolded; it is the story of a woman who was loved, suspected, and ultimately destroyed by a man’s obsessive need for certainty. The famous “eyes of a ressaca” (undertow eyes) are no longer a symbol of deceit, as Bentinho frames them, but rather a mark of Capitu’s profound, unreadable interiority—a depth that Bentinho fears precisely because he cannot possess or control it.
The use of sound and editing to simulate Bento’s obsessive compulsions is masterful. We see his "casmurrice" (his stubborn, reclusive nature) manifested in the cluttered, claustrophobic sets. By the end, the viewer is left questioning their own judgment. Are we seeing the truth, or only Bento’s distorted version of it? Seriado Capitu - Luis Fernado de Carvalho
: The character of Bento is often represented as a triad—Dom Casmurro (the narrator), Bento Santiago (the adult), and Bentinho (the youth)—to show different stages of his life simultaneously. Aesthetic and Visual Style The most striking departure of Carvalho’s adaptation is