Synopsis
There's an abundance of life but precious little joy in the Brazil portrayed by director Cláudio Assis in Mango Yellow. Assis focuses on a group of working-class people living hardscrabble lives in the favelas of Recife. Recife is a major city of a million and a half people; the highrise business district is occasionally observed in the background. But the lives seen here are not only on the economic edge; they are freighted with loneliness, and existential angst. Assis stretches his characters up to and perhaps beyond the edge of reality. In their extremes, he suggests a malaise infecting Brazil.
Wellington (Chico Díaz) is a butcher in a slaughterhouse. His wife, Kika (Dira Paes), is a devout evangelical, given to wearing covered up clothing in a tropical city where skin is casually exposed all around. Wellington values his wife's religious conviction because it assures him of her fidelity, even as he carries on an affair with another woman.
Wellington delivers meat to the seedy Texas Hotel, whose flamboyantly gay cook, Dunga (Matheus Nachtergaele), lusts after the butcher to no avail. Aurora, an older resident of the hotel, is an asthmatic hooked on her oxygen tank, overweight, and terrified of the loneliness she suffers. Nearby, at a cafe, Ligia (Leona Cavalli), the barkeep, flaunts her sexuality even as she fights off the constant physical advances of the scruffy customers. One of those, Isaac, referred to as "the German," is obsessed with death--he buys the bodies of the newly dead, tastes the blood, and fires his gun into the corpse.
Late in the film, after the intertwined destinies of these characters have unfolded, Assis offers a series of portraits of the people of this neighborhood--women and men, from children to the aged, of every shade of skin color. These are people of great energy, but it seems to lead them only in circles of marginal poverty. They are full of life, but their spirits are troubled. The fight for survival seems to have left them without a spiritual core.
About the Director
Cláudio Assis was born in Caruaru, Pernambuco. He directed Henrique (1987), Soneto do Desmantelo Blue (1993), and Texas Hotel (1999), short films that granted him numerous awards in the main Brazilian film festivals. He was also the production manager of the feature film, Baile Perfumado (1997), grand winner of the Brasília Film Festival. |
