Macunaima

Macunaíma (Grande Otelo / Paulo José) is a lazy anti-hero born black in Amazonas. After the death of his mother, he moves with his two brothers to Rio de Janeiro, but along his journey, he baths in a fountain and becomes Caucasian. Once in Rio, he incidentally meets the killer guerrilla woman Ci (Dina Sfat), who wears an amulet made of stone, and they fall in love for each other. They live together and a couple of months later, Ci delivers a black baby. While carrying a bomb for a terrorist attack in the stroller, the bomb explodes and Ci and the baby die, and the amulet vanishes. A very strong man finds the stone and Macunaíma tries to recover it. In the end, he returns to the jungle.

"Macunaíma" is a non-sense, anarchic, crazy and surrealistic Brazilian cult-movie and I am not sure whether a foreigner may like it or not. The story is funny, and belongs to a very specific moment of the history of Brazil, with the "Cinema Novo" ("New Cinema") and "Tropicalismo" movements and the military dictatorship. Further, it is absolutely original and unique, without any reference to another movie or use of clichés. Just as a curiosity, the rigid censorship in 1969 did not allow to expose two breasts at the same time. It was permitted to show one, but not both of them. The viewer can note that specially when Dina Sfat is in the kitchen wearing no shirt. When she turns, her left breast is covered by an object that she is holding. Today (04 April 2008) I have watched this film again, now in a magnificently restored (unfortunately very expensive) DVD. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): 'Macunaíma'

For those who are wanting the essential background knowledge of Brazil's past turmoil, chances are one (like this reviewer) may find themselves unable to suffer fools gladly of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's cinematic adaptation of Mário de Andrade's titular modernist novel.

Macunaima is the son of an indigenous woman who lives in the jungle with her two other sons, the white-skinned Maanape (Arena) and the dark-skinned Jigue (Gonçalves), and Macunaima, first played by the diminutive black actor Grande Otelo smack out of his mother's womb, is, according to the voiceover, "a hero without a character", and indeed we are instantly seized by the film's foolishly nihilistic, surreal style that is vigorously honed by its vibrant palette, zippy rhythm and wacky performance, especially by Otelo, who makes a helluva fun as a bawdy tot inconceivably maturing into an adolescent man, during a roll in the hay with Jigue's lover Sofará (Fomm), magic occurs, he becomes a handsome white man (José, who also plays the role of the brothers' mother). Pigmentation matters, even for the primordial libido.

The family's tapir-hunting good old days come to a halt when the mother dies abruptly (after Macunaima having a brush with a cannibalistic man), whereupon the brothers moves from the tribal land to Rio de Janeiro. Macunaima is captured by a feral guerrilla fighter Ci (Sfat), together they have a son (Otelo again), but bereavement soon catches up with him, and the desultory plot takes him up against a giant merchant Wenceslau Pietro Pietra (a funnily bulked up Filho), who inexplicably has the amulet from the deceased Ci, during which a cross-dressing Macunaima tries to seduce him only to no avail, and many a raunchy snippet punctuates the story with fitful energy and idiosyncrasy, some are hilarious but all shy of a sense of reverberation.

When the wrangle with Wenceslau reaches its improbable coda (a giant swing and a swimming pool full of dismembered bodies make unusual bedfellows to settle the dissension), Macunaima and his brothers returns to their sylvan turf, and this cradle-to-grave rhapsody ends with an inane splash that a connection towards this hammock-lying imbecile is rendered futile.

High on narcissism and male chauvinism, distaff parts are patly sexualized and depicted as erotomaniacs, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's MACUNAIMA dates quickly in its ideology and mores, but on a lesser note, its visual grotesquerie makes it a curio worth visiting, better, if one can comb through its social analogy which is by default missing from this reviewer's limited perspective.

Macunaíma is one of the weirdest films I have watched and, I may also state, is a quite overrated movie. An adaptation (probably a very personal and loose one) of modernist classic novel by Mário de Andrade (which I did not read), Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Macunaíma is less magic but not more realist. Indeed, it seems to seek a cubist or mosaic-like outcome, such as the books's mood: it does it through changes in style and in characters' traits, and through a very chaotic story. Bright and colourful, noisy and alegoric, it was a meeting of Cinema Novo with Chanchada, two opposite Brazilian cinema "waves". Besides that, in many situations it emulates animated cartoon aesthetics, although doing it with live action in genrrally raw sets. It could have been nice, but serious sins led it to what I consider a failure. First of all: racism (the hero is considered ugly when is born as black but when becomes a handsome prince he is white Paulo José; not to mention the native characters who are whites or blacks); if there were ironies and sarcasm, it was supposed to be more clear and not open to be taken as acceptable. Secondly: mysoginy; there is a gag on sexual harassment and rape (not to mention the psychological role of all women in the whole movie)! I do not know if racist and sexist traits were already present in Mário de Andrade's book, or if they were there but in a more critical view of society and as an undoubtful mockery. The third sin is that the absurd situations, be them surrealist of absurd, should have been more well connected to each other. Unfortunately, seriously disagreeing with Brazilian experts, I think it lays far from what should be expected due the importance of the director and many actors: besides Grande Otelo, the best ever in Brazilian cinema and television, there are Hugo Carvana, Paulo José, Joana Fomm, Rodolfo Arena, Jardel Filho, Milton Gonçalves...

I first saw Macunaima in a World Cinema class here at Rutgers University. The film is about a native Brazilian born fully grown as he is depicted as defecated more than born, a dark Black baby to a White mother and all White siblings.Macunaima faces the harsh reality of his color, as he picks out the scraps a pig's end trails as his brothers eat the succulent flesh.He then finds a well which spurts water which turns him White, in a fantastically colorful sequence, Macunaima revels in his new color, as it changes his life and opens doors of opportunity to metropolitan Sao Paulo as he meets a guerrilla assassin femme fatale with whom he bares a Black child. She is killed, he seeks to avenge her death and realizes being White isn't all its cracked up to be. Macunaima has to wrangle with blood sucking neocolonialists. Despite its serious subject matter, Macunaima creates a carnivalesque atmosphere, light hearted wit and sexy mystique that defines Brazil

I discovered this movie by chance so many years back when I was watching a film by Rogério Sganzerla. The first time I ever saw this movie was a hacked-up version of a torrent file. Even with all its naughty bits cut out, I could see this movie was a definite cult classic. When I finally got to see the whole thing during the lockdown, I could not stop laughing. It is a Bizarre political reading of Brazil with a lot of satire and is a kind of folk fairy tale told in a style that blends Terry Jones, Tomás Gutiérrez, Alea Mario Monicelli, Ulrike Ottinger with Jean-Luc Godard. Two major themes form the center of the film. On the one hand it is about racism, social class and anthropophagic portrait of Brazil. The second, major topic deals with miscegenation. For this reason, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade shifts the narrative perspective towards the big city after black Macunaíma turns white. As for the rest of the film, it's a mixed bag of weirdness--all cloaked in a strange and bizarre plot involving weird encounters and surreal sequences supported with an amazing soundtrack. In summary: if you're looking for a serious film that has terrific visual effects and absolutely no gaping plot holes, look elsewhere. I'd even go so far as to say that this film intentionally utilized poor visual effects and more than a few plot holes just to make the movie weirder. This is a big plus, and makes it all the more remarkable, because you can tell this was done on a small budget, but makes the best of it.