Iracema (1975)

Second viewing; first was on September 13, 1989.

An adolescent girl living in Northern Brazil as a prostitute encounters a truck driver heading South and decides to accompany him.

Probably few films have gone so far in mixing fiction and documentary and producing such a realistic feel. This is a considerable achievement, of course. The downside is that it is a film with little structure. And of course nothing I said means that what we see is "real", just that it looks "real". A characteristic of these so-called "realistic" films is that they concentrate on the grostesque, the decadent, the miserable, and so on. That occurs precisely because their lack of structure excludes to a great extent, or completely, the time element. It is a philosophical point which each viewer must confront whether this exclusion is truthful or deceitful, or neither.

Rating: 65 (down from 69)