Review by Frank Plowright

Only a single graphic novel wins the prestigious honour of being voted the year’s best at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, and in 2022 it was Marcello Quintanilha’s Listen, Beautiful Márcia. The award, though, conveys a weight of expectation, and while readable from the start, it takes a while to develop into something more.

Márcia is a nurse living in Trianon, a poor area of Brazil with her partner Alúiso and her adult daughter Jacqueline. To start with her problems are of the type that affect us all, like the complications of trying to cancel a mobile phone service, but they rapidly escalate to levels it’s hoped most readers will never experience. Márcia cares for people, but her relationship with Jacqueline is fractious, as she can see the path down which her daughter is heading, with all warnings fobbed off. That feeds indirectly into Márcia’s life taking a terrifying turn for the worse.

Quintanilha uses multiple muted colours to create a vibrancy deliberately at odds with the mood he cultivates. Despite Márcia’s great awareness, even during her daily hospital work life can suddenly become dangerous, and the way Quintanilha instantly switches into such situations is consistently startling. The actual linework is sketchy and impressionistic, leaving the colour to add depth and detail via a digital form of acrylic paint, and the oversized format accentuates the vibrant tones.

Márcia wants to live a decent life, but her daughter lacks any respect and proves beyond control. It’s poignantly shown that no matter how badly Jacqueline behaves Márcia’s motherly love and concerns about the dangers she’s exposing herself to transcend anger. When matters escalate to a crisis point everything falls apart, and the powerful emotional turmoil elevates what until then has been decent drama, transforming into a story powerful enough to win international prizes.

The title comes from a CD Márcia accidentally drops when visiting a dementia sufferer. It’s a romantic song offering dreams of a better life than Márcia has, and she invests in that when her certainties begin to crumble. There’s a puzzling scene where Márcia eventually confronts her daughter where it’s not clear what Quintanilha means, but otherwise she’s so intuitively constructed as a strong person living under unbelievable pressure that her true feelings are known to readers even when she’s denying them to herself. The greatest heartbreak occurs toward the end when she’s come to a decision about her future and looks set to entirely cut off her past without good reason.

Listen, Beautiful Márcia broadly qualifies as crime drama, yet it’s the prevailing sense of humanity that pushes it beyond, Márcia’s personality proving stronger than mere genre classification.