Love Stories Only Last 90 Minutes. Or Machado de Assis meets Rubem Fonseca.
Zeca is a literary cliché: a young man who works for years on his novel, "an ambitious project, kind of gothic, thriller-like" stuck on page 50. Living in an old "European look"… More
Love Stories Only Last 90 Minutes. Or Machado de Assis meets Rubem Fonseca.
Zeca is a literary cliché: a young man who works for years on his novel, "an ambitious project, kind of gothic, thriller-like" stuck on page 50. Living in an old "European look" apartment in Lapa, the famous bohemian neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro, he is married to a woman who seems to have "come out of a French movie: beautiful, intelligent, independent and cold, thoroughly cold". At least that's how he sees her.
Like it happens in Machado's novel Dom Casmurro (Sir Dour), all we know about the other characters is what the protagonist tells/shows us. Like Bentinho suspected of Capitu, Zeca is almost sure that his wife, Julia, is cheating on him with her friend, Carol. Trying to get to know his rival, "in a rational process to understand that which is unacceptable in principle: being dumped for someone else", he ends up falling in love with Carol and the love triangle is settled.
Some jokes may not make sense to a foreign viewer like the line about Bravo magazine ("I'm chick and cultured") and Paulo Coelho ("Am I the sort of man to quote Paulo Coelho?"), which scene is, by the way, really funny. For Brazilians. If you don't know at least a little bit about Rubem Fonseca and haven't read on Bravo that "90% of today's Brazilian writers sucked off his ideas", some characteristics of Zeca and some situations may pass unnoticed. He decided to drink till he forgot his own name and when he was almost there, someone decided to remind him: Rubem Fonseca! A copy of the best one.
"I burst into the building out to get Julia's confession by force. The hassle is I live on the last floor. So, I was bloodthirsty on the first steps, but by the second, I wanted to have a tough but civilized conversation. By the third, I'd decided to wait for her to tell me the truth. When I knocked on the door, I'd already resigned myself to being a tame cuckold".
The film has a great, but mostly male chauvinist sense of humor, that couldn't, of course, to leave aside the typical and unnecessary nudity and sex scenes. Unnecessary even to a selfish and immature "wannabe Rubem Fonseca"? Yeah, taking it from this point of view, I think they were not that gratuitous.
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