Heleno

Heleno de Freitas was Botafogo's striker in the Rio of the 1940s. Merciless on the pitch and more so off it: women, gambling, ether, fights. He could not get along with his teammates, with referees, or with himself. He wore the Brazil shirt but never made a World Cup. He was out of football at thirty-one. What follows goes fast: syphilis, an asylum, and death at thirty-nine. The film does not present him as a hero but as a man eating himself alive. José Henrique Fonseca directs, in black and white; a hundred and sixteen minutes. Rodrigo Santoro plays Heleno and lost a great deal of weight for it. The mood is close to film noir, and the period it covers is the brightest stretch of Rio's night life.