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Fritz Lang once envisioned a film about a hippie maiden's LSD reverie leading to impalement, here is the coed succumbing to a bacchanalia of wastrels and tokers and welcoming the staff of a sadistically horny Moses. Brazil in the midst of an outbreak of depravities, starting with a comely junkie before an audience of businessmen (the ground-level angle lends an architecture view to the bare figure on the pisspot) and spreading to every stratum, from the virgin's fright on the casting couch to the fetishist's bliss at scrubbing panties. "What messages do you see in all this pornography?" The psychiatrist (Sérgio Hingst) has a study in mind, in the same panel is a certain bearded celebrity expounding on the split between performer and persona. "Excuse me, but Zé do Caixão stayed back in the graveyard. You are talking to José Mojica Marins." The experiment has four addicts venture into the maelstrom of São Paulo's underground scene ca. 1969, meaning a stage performance of Brecht's In the Jungle of Cities, a flickering discotheque out of Simon of the Desert, and a screening This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse. The last stop naturally leaves the strongest impression, so Zé himself materializes to guide the quartet through a psychedelic jaunt that surely excited the jealousy of Jodorowsky. Corman's The Trip informs the procession of inspiringly hideous liberties, enhanced by a soundscape of disembodied shrieks, cackles, tinny samba—an Artaudian cyclone, replete with genius. "Couldn't you make a film with a positive message?" "Answer censored." The artist besieged at his TV trial and triumphant in his hallucinatory element, Mojica Marins bids the camera a grinning adieu (cf. F for Fake). With Mário Lima, Ozualdo Candeias, Andreia Bryan, and Lurdes Ribas. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |