Caramuru: Brazil Reinvented

Diogo Álvares decorates maps in Lisbon. He draws the landscape of his own imagination onto one and it gets him into trouble; he is put on a ship. The ship goes down off the Brazilian coast. He comes ashore and a tribe finds him. It is decided that he will be eaten. Then two sisters step in: Paraguaçu and Moema. Diogo stays. He learns the language, lives with the two sisters, and goes on drawing his maps. The French arrive. Diogo is taken to Europe and presented at the royal court. Guel Arraes directs. Selton Mello plays Diogo and Camila Pitanga plays Paraguaçu; Luís Melo and Tonico Pereira are in the cast. It is a Brazilian production. The film was first made as a series for television and a cinema version was prepared afterwards. Its ground is a historical person; Diogo Álvares Correia lived in Bahia in the sixteenth century and was known as Caramuru. The narrative does not take history seriously; anachronism is used deliberately and the official account is mocked. The matter it treats is a founding story of colonisation; the film gives it not as heroism but as accident and interest. The humour is verbal; the distance between narrator and characters keeps breaking. The film did well at the Brazilian box office and reached a wide audience through the television version. The narrative does not use the indigenous people only as background, but the characters still stay limited. Its limit is tone; the moves between comedy and history are abrupt and the narrative scatters in places. Who it is for: viewers who like Brazilian comedy and historical parody. Who it is not for: it is episodic, the humour local, and the ending easy.