God's Comedy

Joao Cesar Monteiro's Portuguese film follows Joao de Deus, a middle-aged man working in an ice cream parlour in Lisbon. He is fixated on the young women who work in the shop, and spends his days testing recipes and ordering a notebook he keeps. The film neither endorses nor condemns the fixation. Monteiro plays the character himself and shows him as ridiculous, pitiable and disquieting at once. The narrative is deliberately slow; scenes run long and there is almost no music. The language and the form lean on high culture while the subject is entirely of the body. That contrast is central to Monteiro's cinema; what he mocks is largely the claim to nobility his own character constructs. Who it's for: those who like Portuguese auteur cinema and provocative work. Who it's not for: viewers who do not want to watch sexual fixation built on an age gap and workplace power; the film puts that at its centre and offers no critical frame.