User reviews

Now here's a very bad movie on so many levels that it's hard to describe and all one can say is to avoid it all costs. "Jardim de Alah" ("Garden of Alah") is a terribly confusing experiment destined to show that different social classes behavior on similar manners and are somewhat united to a common cause which is to evolve to an upper level at the expense of others - rich take advantage of their own class and the poor, and poor take advantage of the rich and their own class as well. As a social study it was pointless and pitiful; as a comedy which claims that it is, it has zero humor and goes on and on much to everyone's annoyance.

In a limited neighborhood of Rio - where the Jardim is located - dividing rich and poor people, the characters go as such: a social studies student (Françoise Forton) who's conducting a study on how those classes deal with each other; a wealthy businessman (Raul Cortez) who feels he's being stepped over by a business partner (Carlos Kroeber); his addict daughter (Isabela Garcia) who falls in love with a confident drug dealer (Joel Barcellos); a poor local man (Grande Otelo) who gets interviewed by the student; and our guide through it all is a statue located in such garden (I'm not sure who provides the voice but it sounds exactly like Cissa Guimarães. If so, she went uncredited everywhere).

Awfully and painfully disjointed, the movie and the characters fail to connect with each other and with us. They're all dumb, inconsequential, critical of everything and everyone, and when there's some small connections to be made and a sense of purpose where they're finally acting out it's when all things go wrong or strangely right, as in the case of the rich man deceived by his partner, who got exactly what he wanted when the other guy fell dead after an overdose.

David Neves fails at all levels, because it's not funny neither dramatically interesting. Confusing with its series of idiotic small scenes that go nowhere, and not a single likeable character - though Cortez character has a certain appeal of his own since he doesn't play the typical rich villain. And judging by this movie no one is saved: rich, poor, middle class, they're all bad, with lousy characters and moral, and power and money are only conquered at each other's expenses and zero work done. Zero humor as well. 2/10.