Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970)

Woman married to a sarcastic, egocentric, shallow, ungrateful, and exploitative husband takes a lover who doesn't treat her much better.

Drama based on a novel which, judging from the movie, was clearly written by a woman with a deep-seated hatred of men. There is no attempt to situate these people culturally; they celebrate Christmas but there is not a hint of any religious convictions or social roots. As an abstract exercise on conjugal sadomasochism, it is not bad, and is even sort of funny.

Rating: 51

Ma pomme (1950)

American title: Just Me.

A treasure is found at a construction site, with a will attached to it. After a search, the inheritors are found. The will establishes that one particular line of the bequeather's descendancy is to be empowered with the decision concerning the transmission of the inheritance. This man happens to be a tramp who thinks money brings mostly problems. He is initially inclined towards not accepting the inheritance, to the consternation of the other inheritors, who would thus be also deprived of it. However, when a new inheritor is found, he changes his mind.

Weakly scripted musical comedy with some interesting philosophical points, which are poorly explored.

Rating: 31

A família Lero-Lero (1953)

Second viewing; first viewed on November 15, 1992

Based on the play by Raimundo Magalhães Jr., first performed in 1941

A civil servant is constantly mistreated by his wife and leeched upon by his two sons and daughter who dream of impossible careers instead of settling down on modest yet reliable jobs. At work things are no better: he is a poorly paid civil servant who endures terrible working conditions. One day he decides to get away from it all.

Comedy which satirizes the Brazilian lower middle class and the infernal public service which was (and, in at least some aspects, still is) typical of that country. It is above-average for Brazilian standards in comicity and technical accomplishment. Its main actor, by his physical traits and demeanor, looks remarkably Japanese.

Rating: 56 (unchanged)

Le roi (1949)

Based on the play by Gaston Arman de Caillavet, Robert de Flers, and Émile Arène, first performed in 1908.

A foreign monarch is visiting France and gets pastry in the face thrown by a woman who happens to be the wife of a congressman. His party colleagues approach the politician and suggest ways to neutralize the embarrassing incident, which involve hunting and -- profiting from the monarch's philandering proclivities -- women.

Well-made comedy which sheds some light on the curious phenomenon of cuckolds in high places.

Rating: 52

Mr. Turner (2014)

Biopic about an English painter. He never marries and is something of a maverick and a curmudgeon.

Big disappointment from a diretor who had been consistently good up to this point. To be accurate, Vera Drake had an absurd plot, but scene by scene it was interesting. Not so this one, which has a plausible story (inevitable since it is a real one) but hardly any interesting scene. If you are curious of how Turner humped the maid from behind, or are particularly excited about absolutely trivial dialogue, this is for you. On the plus side, this is a photogenic film, even for digital which is a step backwards in film history. P.S. I am anxious for the DVD extras which will no doubt include Turner in the john, Turner's daughter's death in childbirth, the maid getting undressed in the dermatologist's office, and an extended version of the sequence where Turner discusses the evils of slavery with the traumatized slave merchant.

Rating: 40

Matou a família e foi ao cinema (1969)

Second viewing; first viewed on March 3, 1999

English title: Killed the Family and Went to the Movies

Several stories with a common theme of domestic violence. The central story is about two young middle-class women who are alone in a secluded mansion and talk about married life.

I still like the way this film plays with fragmentation and self-reference, and the use of the same actors in different but related roles; also, the use of songs in the soundtrack is daring and effective. I don't know if the film can be interpreted in one single way, but the Power theme seems to pervade all stories, and the underlying assumption seems to be foucauldian: the private sphere is subject to mechanisms of oppression which are analogous to the ones in the public sphere. I don't know why I couldn't relate in the same positive way with other films by this director. Perhaps it is a matter of giving them a second chance.

Rating: 72 (down from 86)

Babettes gæstebud (1987)

Second viewing; first viewed on June 4, 1989

English title: Babette's Feast

Based on a short story by Karen Dinesen, first published in 1958

Two sisters living in a remote fishing village are discouraged from marrying by their possessive father. In their elder years, they take a French refugee woman as a servant.

On Wikipedia, it says that its diretor changed the setting from that of the story so it would not look too 'touristy'. I find that funny, because this is a film which I appreciated mostly as an aesthetical succession of images. There is hardly any imagination in the mise-en-scène, and the text itself I found somewhat poor, relying as it does on clichés about both Nordic people and French ones. Reportedly, this is Jorge Bergoglio's favorite movie. It figures that the Court Jester of the Catholic Church should choose a Protestant movie as his personal pick. It also makes sense that a film which celebrates the pleasures of the flesh, albeit not the sexual ones, should find resonance in someone who is forced into perpetual celibacy by his own faith. He probably was also moved by the film's refugees-as-vibrancy message. In Brazil, this film was a great success amid the middle class, probably because it is a womanly film.

Rating: 50 (down from 59)

Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973)

English title: The Legend of Paul and Paula

A working-class girl who has had a disastrous first relationship with a man falls in love with another who is already married, albeit unhappily so. They start seeing each other, but, despite their mutual affection, his lack of commitment poses problems.

Boring love story, allegedly Angela Kazmierczak's favorite movie. Some online reviews would have you think it is a very subversive film, but that is very far from being the truth; its characters, overall mood, and the reception it had bring to mind those verses from a Talking Heads song: "We don't want freedom. We don't want justice. We just want someone to love." It is my impression that, even for its time and place, the film's discourse is far from contestatory. For our time and place, it just reinforces the very conformist discourse of individualism which has been prevalent in our liberal society all through the duration of the closed regimes of Eastern Europe. The fact of the matter is that there really wasn't much of a difference between the two sides of the Cold War. The side that lost was seduced by images of a Paradise which was really a Hell which they are now experiencing, some of them under the fabulous leader mentioned in the beginning of this review.

Rating: 20

Memórias de um gigolô (1970)

English title: Memoirs of a Gigolo

Adventures of a man who spends his adolescence in a whorehouse, and falls in love with one of the girls, who has a relationship with a pimp.

Picaresque comedy with a very childish script. The author is of Italian stock, and I think it shows in the film's style, to which the diretor, born in that jolly peninsula, may have contributed. It is not badly filmed. The actors suit their respective roles fine, and perform professionally. The cinematography has nice colors and some of the locations are really photogenic. This is the kind of stuff that pleased audiences in the seventies in Brazil. They are probably just as undemanding today, but the films themselves have become quite unbearable, unlike this one, which has the bare minimum of goods to keep one from walking away.

Rating: 31

O Ibraim do subúrbio (1976)

Film in two segments: "Roy, o gargalhador profissional", about a professional cackler, and "O Ibraim do subúrbio", about a poor tailor who lives in a fantasy world of wealth and social celebrity.

I wouldn't recommend this film, because the scripts of both segments leave a lot to be desired. But for gleaners like me, there may be some value in its commentary about the plight of the poor folks who work hard and at times don't even have a place to work. The phenomenon which Marx named 'false consciousness' is explored on the second segment. The first one, which shows a grimmer reality of struggle and borderline despair, is seasoned with cruel irony. One doesn't see much of this mood in films made in Europe or the U.S., probably because the people there do not experience this neglect by the powers that be. Even in Brazil, there are few filmmakers today who are into exposing social wounds. But the wounds are still there.

Rating: 31

A Compadecida (1969)

English title: Our Lady of Compassion.

Based on the play O Auto da Compadecida, by Ariano Suassuna, written in 1955 and first staged in 1956.

Two small-town bakery employees, one a trickster and the other his simple-minded sidekick, go through several incidents as a gang of bandits raid the town in a murdering frenzy.

Botched theatrical adaptation, with no sense of narrative and poorly designed cinematic sequences. It has a lot of competent artists working in it, as cenographer, cinematographer, etc., and that shows, but a good crew a good film does not make; it takes a good screenplay and a competent diretor, both of which seem to be missing here. The storyline could be divided into two sections, the first of which is a picaresque sequence of events, and the second of which invokes the supernatural to convey a socially-updated re-reading of Christianity, with a preachy undertone to it. The Internet Movie Database hilariously merges two people into a single entity under the name George Jonas. One is this film's diretor, who was a Hungarian-born man established in Brazil in the celluloid processing business and later as a producer of TV advertising. The other is his much more famous namesake, who was also Hungarian-born but established himself in Canada as a journalist.

Some internet links about the Brazilian guy: on his book of memoirs and on his death.

Rating: 32

White Dog (1982)

Second viewing; first viewed on October 31, 1997.

Based on the story (or, according to some sources, on the novel) by Romain Gary, first published in 1970.

A young actress finds a stray dog and adopts it. After some time, she finds out it has been trained to attack blacks.

As I watched this, it increasingly puzzled me that I was so overwhelmed by it on my first viewing. Unfortunately, I have no way of getting back for a few instants to my previous self so I can understand what it was that blew me away then. I can more or less hypothesize that it had to do with the careful building up of suspense and atmosphere, attributes which so many critics have pointed out, and I still now acknowledge. Sadly, I suspect it also had to do with allegorical interpretations which critics also came up with, and to which I no longer subscribe. Although the storyline has the potential elements for that, they are too vaguely sketched (e.g., one cannot really know why the dog behaves in the specific way it does in the end, or what this could mean allegorically). But this is not why I cooled down about it; the fact is, this is only a slightly above average suspenser, with some dullness in the midsection, and a problematic plot weakness relating to the dog trainer's poorly explained motivation to persist in his course of action. However, if you are dead set on making this into a parable of sorts, I think you may view it as a moral tale about the dangers of doggedness.

Rating: 66 (down from 84)

Night Passage (1957)

A man is employed by the railroad to prevent a payroll robbery.

I watched it last Saturday. It's not very good, and I didn't find the prospect of writing this review too compelling, so I kept postponing it. It's a very overplotted movie, and overcrowded with characters. It is sort of entertaining in a way, but everything seems quite irrelevant and improbable and very pulp-fiction-ish.

Saw it in pan-and-scan.

Rating: 37

Quem sabe... sabe! (1956)

Alternatively punctuated title: Quem Sabe, Sabe!

Musical comedy. A card reader operates in partnership with her brother, who gets information on her clients through their female servants.

Rather weak, but with a marginal value of cultural document. This is not one of the morally sounder films I have seen, what with its protagonists being a couple of crooks, and much of the cast of characters getting involved in shady deeds of one sort or another. As usual with immoral films, it purports to have a moral message, which in this case is that discrimination against chorus girls is bad. It seems to be a case of defending one's own backyard, since there is really no difference between the profession of the young actresses and that of the characters they play.

Rating: 31

Bar Esperança (1983)

Second viewing; first viewed between the date of its Brazilian release and December, 1986.

U.S. title (according to IMDB): Bar Esperanza

It centers on a writer's decision of quitting his TV job and on his wife's decision of leaving him because of that. Other characters are the patrons of a bar where the couple regularly goes.

While it depicts Brazilian TV as a place where artists are slowly killed, or transformed into zombies, much like its mass of spectators, it follows the strictly TV-like template of sitcoms, which is another kind of artistic dead end. A shallow movie, with one or two interesting sequences (e.g., when the barfly pesters the protagonist into a fake duel), and fine camerawork.

Rating: 49 (down from 52)

The Pigeon That Took Rome (1962)

World War II. Two Americans are assigned an espionage mission in Nazi-occupied Rome. They stay with an Italian family and must relay information to the Allies.

It is clear from the latest reviews here that love in film is an excellent dramatic vehicle to analyze a vast array of human endeavors and the psychological traits they entail. The love triangle is one of the structures that have been used to show how human conflict evolves and is resolved. There is no explicit love triangle here, or rather, one of the vertices has only a virtual existence, so to speak. One character will marry a woman who has been impregnated by an enemy soldier; his sergeant falls in love with her sister, who gives her sexual favors to German officers. This type of cuckoldry plays like an individual metonimy for the collective War phenomenon: every level of the fight consists of someone giving his life for the profit of someone else, who may be, according to the scope of analysis, a top ranking officer, the government, the capitalist establishment, etc. The messaging aspect of the plot adds another angle of correspondence: just as cuckoldry inserts noise into the communications system in which human semen is supposed to relay the biological message that propagates one's genetic characteristics, war communications are constantly subject to all kinds of interferences which may revert the outcome of the conflict. The film itself is part of a deeper level of miscommunication whose purpose is to conceal behind patriotic notions the identity of those who profit from all the killing and maiming -- one's real enemies, in short.

Rating: 39

Le combat dans l'île (1962)

English festival title: Fire and Ice
Proper English translation of the title: The Fight in the Island

A woman has a relationship with a rightwing militant, who is assigned to perform an assassination. After the act, the couple take refuge with a childhood friend who is a leftwing militant who prints political material and despises violent action.

An earlier exploration on the Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands theme, with a diferent take that eschews the economic angle. The film seems to be biased toward the Left, which seems to be comprised of peace-loving and family-oriented individuals, whereas the Right is violent and egotistical in personal relationships. That is obviously belied by a long view on History, although it may make sense in connection with that particular moment in France. Viewed as a political allegory, the implication seems to be that the Left is reluctantly, yet inevitably, drawn into Violence by the actions of Reactionaries.

Rating: 31

Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1976)

Second viewing; first viewed on some indeterminate date before January 1987.

English title: Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.

Based on the novel by Jorge Amado (1st ed., 1966), which has some plot elements borrowed from or simply coincidental with the 1941 play Blithe Spirit, by Noel Coward.

A young widow remarries but her new, methodic, husband can't ease her lust the way her late one, a gambler and a womanizer, did.

An allegory of Brazil, a land which, as the theme-song succinctly puts it, "can't be governed, now or ever". The actual comedy is precisely conceived in the typical Brazilianate style, which does not allow for high flights of sophistication but gets the message through. As the previously reviewed here O Homem dos Papagaios, fiscal irresponsibility plays an important part in the plot. Here, the twist consists in making the suffering wife the dramatic center, thus deepening the analysis carried out in that movie.

Rating: 58 (up from 57)

O homem dos papagaios (1953)

Epaminondas is a man experiencing financial difficulties who crosses paths with a former schoolmate; the latter tries to help him by employing him as janitor in a vacant mansion. The people in the mansion's  neighborhood get the idea that Epaminondas is the new owner and he takes advantage of the misunderstanding, with problematic consequences.

A reasonably well-made film, watchable but lacking in real creativity. The curious thing is the similarity in structure with Catch Me If You Can (2002). The film also works as an allegory for the present situation of the country in which it was made (in this case, however, the ending is, for the moment, just wishful thinking).

Rating: 40

Chato's Land (1972)

Western. A half-breed kills a sheriff in self-defense, and some of the town's people form a posse to go after him.

While an entertaining film, it is a bit disgusting to see such intense White self-loathing. The times were of burgeoning liberalism, but Hollywood sometimes preferred to approach such candent themes as segregation and Vietnam by using a third party, in this case Native Americans. Truth be told, a few modern viewers think it was a bit early for such a clear-eyed consideration of that East Asian fiasco and credit the similarities to coincidence.

Rating: 51