Some talented people in other fields other than cinema should stay away from directing or making movies since they don't offer audiences any great
filmic experiences or talent behind the camera. I can atest here that singer/songwriter Caetano Veloso is part of such example. As a filmmaker/writer he is
a great musician and his feature debut "O Cinema Falado" ("The Talky Cinema") is one of the weakest films I've ever seen in recent years. It was a painful
and hurtful experience drenched with verbosity and a pretentiousness that never stops. Veloso tries to emulate the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard while presenting
his texts about art, cinema, music, literature and its importance in the Brazilian culture.
Heideger, Nietzsche, Guimarães Rosa, Gertrude Stein and many others are mixed into a fruit salad of ideas that seems to ignore audiences thoughts and all kinds
of subjects are presented here, from arts to the importance of homoeroticism (interesting views though), from pornography to the nostalgic memories of cinema.
It's all talk and no impacting images to show and as for the ideas I find it hard to connect them all or to endorse totally - as when modern art is criticized
for example. At a given moment a couple discuss about pretentious works and why they exist...Voilà, the movie defeats its own purpose by becoming such pretentious
work with too many words and zero memorable images to show. Godard at least gives us some background, some story and narrative then throws his speech about
anything he likes or dislikes. He's a more successful director because of that. There's form, rhythm, style AND substance. "O Cinema Falado" has nothing of that.
This movie is pseudointelectualism at its worst. Exhausting, difficult, wordy, tedious with its long sequences of monologues and extremely hard to find some
coherence. It throws lots of philosophies and doesn't conclude with anything of relevance. As an art film it's a huge disappointment because Mr. Veloso has nothing
to offer in terms of image, maybe one or two sequences are worth seeing (black man on a white background and white man on a black background, both naked on the
floor until their bodies make some connection; or the group at the theatre discussing art) and long, ridiculously long texts that go nowhere. It's just a group of
people trying to bore one another with ideals, manifestos about art and the slow decay art goes through as years go by. No story is given to them, it's just a
gathering of images and they don't teach us nothing.
If the idea of Mr. Veloso was to make a manifest about his artistic notions and preferences then it's all lost in the void. Never had I felt so ashamed and bored
in such waste of celluloid and film, and to think this was shown in cinemas back in the day (an obvious box-office and critical failure). It was pointless and
worthless to say the least. That's what happens when a giant circle of artists friends do by helping one idealistic soul to compose a film and thrown whatever he
can into one single project. All honorable people (won't even mention the names, just check the cast list) but here they didn't contributed with anything valuable.
Avoid this at all costs unless you're into seeing ideas and images you won't be agreeing much afterwards. 4/10.
