Movie Dementia

Carlos Reichenbach's 1986 film moves the Faust legend into eighties Brazil. The heir to a bankrupt cigarette factory, in the middle of a personal collapse, abandons everything and sets off for a paradise he saw in a travel agency window. A figure serving as Mephistopheles goes with him. Reichenbach came out of the marginal strand of Brazilian cinema and works in that tradition's language: colourful, excessive, genre-mixed. Melodrama, erotic cinema, political allegory and the fantastic all run at once. Some scenes are deliberately crude and others surprisingly lyrical. The narrative does not follow a consistent line. Its interest is not plot but the link between the collapse of capitalism, desire and self-knowledge. In that state it counts among the strangest works of Brazilian cinema in the period. Who it's for: viewers open to the experimental and marginal wing of Latin American cinema. Who it's not for: viewers who want a comprehensible story and a consistent tone; the film refuses both on purpose.