Gabe Klinger’s Isabel is a sensorially lush, gorgeously shot portrait of São Paulo whose grain and style ultimately cannot compensate for a narratively thin and politically unexamined exploration of privilege, class, and gentrification.
Isabel, directed by Chicago-based, Brazilian filmmaker Gabe Klinger, received its world premiere at the 2026 edition of Berlinale. The movie follows a middle-class sommelier (Isabel, played by Marina Person) who leaves her Michelin-starred restaurant job to open a natural wine bar — to varying success.
Shot on film, Isabel is gorgeously grainy and stylishly saturated; every frame is coloured with an amazing depth and vivacity — the kind of cinematography that makes you want to book a flight to São Paulo immediately. The city is portrayed with luscious interiors and streets that practically glow, with a beautifully interwoven soundtrack that makes the film a real sensorial delight.
Unfortunately, however, that’s where my enchantment with Isabel ended.
Whilst the premise of the movie promises an exploration of questions around labour, class and a changing urban landscape, none of these questions are meaningfully explored. We are repeatedly told that Isabel sells Brazilian natural wines, but there’s no sense of what that means culturally, politically or economically. As an audience member curious about understanding the connections between wine and the land, producers and local traditions, I was left severely wanting.
Financial difficulty arrives abstractly and emotional stakes remain thin – Isabel’s relationship to her French partner, for example, drifts without consequence. I found myself wondering why or when we were meant to sympathise with her, or where the narrative was actually heading. What remained was the portrait of a privileged woman opening a boutique space that fails — but without any emotional or social depth to anchor the failure itself.
Klinger mentioned in the Q&A that Isabel is partly about class and gentrification, which only deepened my confusion, as there didn’t seem to be any awareness of class, and the only awareness of gentrification came in the celebration of a character enacting the phenomenon herself. One defining moment of this came towards the end, when Isabel, in full party dress, stands above hundreds of empty natural wine bottles as rubbish collectors work around her – a job made all the more difficult as Isabel hasn’t bothered to bag the bottles; the epitome of an aesthetic consumption that leaves others to clean up the material aftermath.
Although I was unmoved by the story and left cringing occasionally at the script, the most unsettling part of Isabel was the privilege it never seems to recognise. And yet, despite my frustration, the film is undeniably sensorially rich with dreamy imagery of contemporary São Paulo, and demonstrates a stunning cinematography which is evocative and charming enough to just about carry Isabel through.
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
