Daniel Rezende is the Oscar-nominated editor who worked on Meirelles’s City of God and Malick’s The Tree of Life; now he makes his feature directing debut with this movie – Brazil’s official Academy Awards entry for best foreign film. It is a strangely heavy-handed and hectoring redemption drama, based on the true story of the former porn actor Arlindo Barreto, who in the 80s became a huge hit throughout Brazil as “Bozo”, a wacky clown on Saturday morning kids’ TV. But he was contractually obliged to keep his real identity a secret. Unable to taste the pleasures of celebrity, Barreto underwent a kind of drug-fuelled breakdown, after which he jettisoned his vanity and emerged spiritually enlightened.
The corporate brand identity of Bozo is apparently still so important that this movie cannot use the name, and so Vladimir Brichta plays “Bingo”, otherwise Augusto Mendes, the womanising divorced guy and father-of-one, sick of acting in telenovelas and soft porn and yearning for acting glory; he finds triumph in a sort of superhero disguise as a clown, but can’t be a celebrity and hero to his son. It is a laborious drama, which takes the true-life myth for granted, and in screenwriting terms there’s an incessant and lazy use of cocaine to indicate: arrogant asshole heading for a fall.
