Film

Macunaima (1969)

Director: Joaquim Pedro de Andrade

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

De Andrade's film has a plot of fairytale simplicity. Macunaima, born black and middle-aged in the Brazilian jungle, turns into a young white on his way to the city. There, he and his stooge-like brothers, wide-eyed but their native shrewdness still intact, are buffeted around by the Marx Brothers-type logic that dominates the plot, while the film takes constant delight in visual incongruities. Macunaima takes up with a girl revolutionary, but she is killed by her own time bomb; the villain is the local industrial magnate, the Cannibal Giant, who feeds his guests to man-eating fish. The film, the introduction tells us, is about consumerism as cannibalism, about a Brazilian devoured by Brazil. It's a bizarre and often very funny comedy that applies its central thesis with unerring accuracy.

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