The fifth program of contemporary Brazilian film is perhaps the most interesting, as well as being the most attractive so far, because it offers five premieres, all quite intriguing and of uniformly good quality
 


Among them are the biographical crime-drama My Name Ain't Johnny, directed by Mauro Lima, the autobiographical social drama Once Upon a Time in Rio by Breno Silveira, and the emphatic and quite pessimistic urban existential drama The Sign of the City by Carlos Alberto Riccelli.


In the award-winning, often quite suggestively directed film by Mauro Lima, we follow the life of the film’s eponymous anti-hero, the young João Guilherme Estrella, also known as Johnny. He is essentially a good-hearted fellow and a member of the Rio de Janeiro’s upper middle class who, during a period of fifteen years, from the early 1990’s to the middle of the last decade, became first a small-time drug dealer, then a heavy user, and eventually the biggest cocaine dealer in Rio de Janeiro. It happened mainly due to the weakness of his character and predilection for quick money and easy life, and partially as a result of circumstance. Similar in genre and execution to Ted Demme’s film Blow, this movie is based on the biographical book of Guilherme Giúze and is conceived as a kind of a chronicle of stumbling and falling, which shows Estrella’s life from his glamorous cocaine orgies, through the turbulent relationship with his wife Sofia, followed by his time as a fugitive from the police and dangerous competitors, and ending with his trial and placement in a psychiatric rehabilitation ward. This fascinating episodic tale, often imbued with dark humor, is filled with colorful characters, dynamic narration, believable dialogues and energetic performances by the cast.


There are elements of a mystery novel in the social drama Once Upon a Time in Rio, directed by Ben Silveira, who reveals to us in the epilogue of this film that he, just like his protagonist Dé, grew up surrounded by violence and poverty in the same favela of Rio. His life could have been the same as Dé’s: a humble and noble young boy whose older brother Beto was killed in front of him. Dé is permanently scarred by this trauma and the fact that, due to his own recklessness, he is responsible for his other brother Carlão ending up in prison. Carlão is the adopted son of Dé’s’s caring mother, who tries quite hard to enable her kids to have a better life. As a teenager Dé gets a job as a hotdog and soft drink salesman on a beach in Ipanema. There he meets Nina, daughter of a wealthy single father who is obsessed with her ​​safety and has raised her in a sheltered environment, reinforced by high fences and alarm systems. When the members of the two diametrically opposed classes fall in love, their story begins to resemble that of Romeo and Juliet; Dé and Nina’s families and class differences get in the way of their relationship. Deftly moving along a razor’s edge of cliché and pathos, the director Silveira and screenwriter Patrícia Andrade create a fresh and very interesting metaphorical image of Brazil as a modern society that is permanently and irreparably separated by class antagonisms, social tensions and irrational violence to such a great extent that it seems to be futile for individuals to attempt to overcome their own limitations.


The protagonists of the urban existentialist drama The Sign of the City by Carlos Alberto Riccelli also fight themselves and their mostly unhappy destinies. Riccelli is the husband of the popular Brazilian actress Bruna Lombardi who wrote the screenplay for this film and stars in it as the astrologist and radio host Teca. She is an attractive middle aged woman from Sao Paolo who is trying to help some of its 18 million citizens by offering comfort and advice for a better future in her radio show. Her and her friends’ lives are quite complicated, from her own relationship with her estranged and terminally ill father, Anibal, who left his wife and daughter when she was a baby, through Teca’s assistant Bia, who hides a homosexual relationship with the transvestite Josialda from his possessive mother, to her new neighbors, the calm and handsome Gil and his neurotic wife Lydia, prone to adultery. Lombardi and Riccelli managed to create a layered study of characters, different forms of love, life’s beauty and pain, existential despair and optimism necessary for survival and the people’s need for relationships with others and finding support in them. They used the method of “short cuts” and wove a dramaturgically harmonious and articulate web of vivacious and interrelated characters that arise from tragic circumstances only to encounter each other in rather unexpected ways.



Based on the book by Fernando Morais, published in 1985, the award-winning romantic war drama Olga, directed by the TV professional Jayme Monjardim, is another biographical story. This one is about the famous revolutionary and fighter against fascism Olga Benário, a woman of German and Jewish origin who spent her life fighting for a better and more just world. She died in the Bernburg Concentration Camp, after the Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas delivered her, pregnant, to the Nazis. Olga’s commitment to her ideals and love for the handsome Luis Carlos Prestes, one of Brazil's greatest revolutionaries, are a dramatic backbone of the well-directed and also episodically structured film, starring the excellent Camile Morgado in the title role.


Finally, there is the cute comedy Seneamento Basico written and directed by Jorge Furtado, who won the Silver Bear in 1990 for his short film Ilha das Flores. A story about the inhabitants of Crystal Line, a provincial Brazilian town, who decide to make an amateur trash-horror film in order to raise money to rebuild the town’s sewer system, is an unpretentious, charming and occasionally very funny film. (Josip Grozdanić)