Two-Edged Knife

Paulo is a wealthy lawyer with a comfortable family life, a child and a faithful attachment to his wife. When he learns that she has been deceiving him with his business partner and closest friend, he lays a perfect plan to kill them both and get away with it easily. But unforeseen factors begin to spoil it: powerful people, large sums of money, the kidnapping of his son and an inspector who will not let go. The film does not offer the murder as a display of cleverness; it gives the plan’s slipping out of control step by step. The account does not put the man in the right, nor leave the victims defenceless. In Brazilian cinema of the late eighties, class and power stand beneath the story. Paulo Jose and Marieta Severo appear in Murilo Salles’s ninety seven minute Brazilian film, completed in 1989.