Invisible Life is an entrancing, uncomfortable experience. Its premise is simple enough. In their early 20s, Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and Guida (Julia Stockler) are sisters living with their parents in a middle-class neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. Eurídice plays piano beautifully and dreams of going to a conservatory in Vienna. Guida is seeing a Greek sailor, unbeknownst to her bourgeois and traditional father.

One night, Guida convinces Eurídice to cover for her while she pretends to be sick so she can sneak out and visit her sailor, but she doesn’t come home in the early morning as planned. Instead, she runs off to Greece. When Guida returns home months later pregnant, her father disowns her and lies to his daughters, telling each that the other is in Europe. The sisters, both unaware that they live in the same city, are then repeatedly thwarted from reuniting.

The film takes place in the 1950s, an era that is often turned to for a nameless but overpowering nostalgia, and it is to its enormous credit that director Karim Aïnouz doesn’t succumb to this temptation. Certainly, there is gorgeous imagery, including recurring motifs of stairways and hills, dance sequences that masterfully merge sound and image, and occasionally a dreamlike ambience. Yet the director doesn’t shy away from ugliness. Indeed, it’s his objective to be frank about the conditions the sisters find themselves in and the kind of lives they lead.

This is one of many recent films to explore the oppressed lives of women, and it wonderfully contrasts the characters’ public and private selves. In one scene, Eurídice and a friend take turns peeing in a bathroom while having a very candid conversation about what Eurídice can expect from her sex life as a newlywed. After leaving the bathroom and rejoining the wedding party, a hesitant Eurídice transforms, feigning gaiety once she returns to the celebration.

If the film embraces melodrama in its plot structure and in heightened touches, like Guida’s recurring voice-over, there is also an equal emphasis on cunningly observed details that ground the story in reality, such as when the father, after disowning Guida, returns to his pedestrian task of scaling a fish.

The simultaneous impulse toward melodrama and realism is perhaps best exemplified by Eurídice’s wedding night, in which there is a genuinely horrifying sex scene. Aïnouz calls for an almost clownish slobber of male desire from Eurídice’s husband, Antenor (Gregorio Duvivier), as she slips over and over again in the bathroom and tries to claw away from him. Though choreographed almost like a slapstick comedy, the scene is anything but funny. Antenor’s behavior, though true to the way many men behave, is heightened in a way that I first felt was over-the-top. Yet I applaud Aïnouz for committing so boldly to this harsh portrayal, as it ultimately fits so well with his objective to look at his characters’ lives unflinchingly. The scene has remained vividly in my mind long after viewing.

Overall, Invisible Life is a work of undeniable talent and poignancy, though it is not easy viewing. Viewers may shy away from the world view Aïnouz exposes or his occasional embrace of melodrama, yet the film is a successfully modulated blend of what could be called conflicting impulses. It stands out most of all as an act of empathy and for the director’s compassion for the sisters. This compassion, I expect, will be shared by viewers.