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"Nothing is born, nothing lives, nothing dies without a reason... Thus exists this film." José Mojica Marins trades Zé do Caixão's cape for the Messiah's sultan robes, though not before rising suitably bare-assed out of the sea. Brazil in the wake of the military junta is his backwater Gomorrah, doctors fuck nurses while patients bleed in the waiting room, the stoning of an adulteress takes place outside a nightclub. The silent prophet wanders into a cathedral when he's curious and drinks from the Communion chalice when he's thirsty, his mere presence is enough to foil a rape or raise an invalid from a wheelchair. (All of this scored to a kazoo rendition of "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head.") In this all-pervasive satire, the tin savior is a fugitive, a Little Tramp, a pasha. The nation's overbearing macho culture is a weak-hearted cuckold resurrected in his coffin (the wife needs to be sodomized in order to fake tears) while the counterculture is nothing but a Day-Glo lightshow ("What is truth if not money," a fistful of coins is all it takes to dissolve the Age of Aquarius). A pox on everybody's house, says Marins' sham Candide, who's busy duping the devout on TV. "I tried atheism for a while, but my faith just wasn't strong enough." Zabriskie Point comes in for a closing jest, Medak's The Ruling Class and Downey's Greaser's Palace pick up the lacerating thread the next year, follow it and arrive at the Church of Christ Without Christ (Huston's Wise Blood). With Teresa Sodré, Roque Rodrigues, Rosangela Maldonado, and Andreia Bryan.
--- Fernando F. Croce |