Collapsing Star

For one of the "required electives" for my major, I am taking 'Latin America Through Film". Sounds like it would have loads of potential right? Well unfortunately we do not make it through many of the films and so far the majority of the ones we do finish are kind of blah.

Like the one we watched yesterday:

The movie features an extremely plain (dare I say fea?) girl from the countryside of Brasil who moves into the city to work. She only eats hot dogs and coca cola, she has a really awful boyfriend who slicks his hair back, her co-worker looks like Carol Burnett doing a caricature of a Portuguese woman, and ***SPOILER ALERT*** she gets hit by a car at the end.

That's Macabea. Her boyfriend "Olimpico" describes the name as sounding like a disease. He's way charming.

Apparently it's based on a really good book written by a prominent Portuguese feminist author who wanted to demonstrate that Macabea was so blissfully unaware as to how sad she should be and was therefore happy and content. That makes the movie sound a bit more interesting than it was. I just couldn't stop thinking about how repulsive everyone was:

I mean... really repulsive:

It got weird at one point because Gloria (the lady on the right sharin' hot dogs and coke) steals Macabea's greasy grossie boyfriend because a fortune teller told her to. Not to mention the whole soundtrack was a mid-80's synth causing the whole film to sound like it would turn into a car chase, detective story, or porn.

The fortune teller was pure Brasilian campy goodness but she also told Macabea that she'd meet a rich gringo ( VIA HIT BY HIS MERCEDES).

But like the author said, Macabea was in her own world.

FIN