The Man Who Copied

A Brazilian film set in Porto Alegre. André is nineteen. He works a photocopier in a stationery shop. He copies thousands of pages a day. Theses, notebooks, identity papers, petitions; he reads all of it. He lives at home with his mother. There is no money and he has no life outside work. He looks at the building opposite through binoculars. Sílvia is there; she is in her room at the same hour every evening. André is in love with her without ever having spoken. He draws. He puts what he sees on paper and parts of the film move into animation. He finally meets her. She works in a shop and has a problem: her father is pressing her over a debt. A sum of money is needed. From there the film runs on one idea. André has a photocopier under his hand and one day he puts a banknote on it. The result is not bad. The narrative turns into a crime comedy from here. Forged money, a shop, a friend, a gun and a plan that keeps growing. What the narrative is interested in is not forgery but copying: its whole idea is that the boy's life is a copy too; he reproduces other people's texts, watches other people's lives through binoculars, and his own story never starts. The telling is fast. André talks to camera, gives numbers, does sums, and tells events in his own order. The animated interludes are its most original feature. The last section turns the whole construction inside out and the question of how much of the narrator to believe is left open. Lázaro Ramos, Leandra Leal, Luana Piovani and Pedro Cardoso are in the cast. Jorge Furtado wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes Brazilian cinema and films with an unreliable narrator. Who it is not for: anyone looking for calm telling; the film talks constantly and the plot gets too crowded in the last half hour.