This is pretty exciting stuff. Historically important perhaps, but I'll let the scholar take that up and dust it. I'm interested in how the cinematic eye is tethered to a world, how space reveals soul, what we call soul. This is Brazilian, it aims to capture ordinary life, ordinary people going about their routine around Rio, the routine unmediated by the camera and presented to us 'as it is', unvarnished.
The ripples of the Italian realist school can be felt, and as with those films the artifice now of course shows. I can tell that it's acted and scripted, that it all ebbs towards story and climax. That most characters are stereotype insertions: the favela orphan, the Copacabana playboy, the lecherous politician that everyone fawns over for a favor.
But through the artifice a fundamental perception of things shows. The characters for one must be rooted in real life, they are ways to approach ranges of life. The story is so we can have dilemmas that plagued Brazilians then: marriage, money, status, well-being. This is one reason to see this, snapshot of a society.
A more exciting reason to visit is how the film takes us through that perception, how the specific issues are approached, in what narrative light, this light being what we could call soul.
The film is threaded around and follows many characters over a single day in Rio with the temperature bringing passions to a boil. It quickly jumps from one life to the one next to it, never bogged down. It moves and dances about without undue suffering. Even when the subject is dire poverty, it keeps a generous spirit that recognizes it can wander from it without forgetting. There are difficulties galore, but somehow it works out like the football underdog scoring for his team in the last minute; movie artifice but in context of this it springs naturally.
Watch this if you can find it, watch it like you would Altman. It will take you through the Copacabana on a scorching morning, take you on a cable car to the statue of Christ, the Maracana in the middle of a packed derby, a favela where there's sickness and poverty. But it will quickly urge you on, life is dance, it is moving on through the day.
It ends in a marvelous way with the two rivals for the affections of a girl meeting at night in the middle of a samba rehearsal for the next Carnival. We expect drama, death. It turns out they know each other, they embrace, laughing it off. Samba music sweeps us up into the night where a lone mother watches from a window.
