Dir: Hector Babenco Argentina-Brazil 2007. 114 mins.
Brazilian director Hector Babenco's latest film is an utterly misbegotten effort, a long way from his earlier successes such as Pixote and Kiss of the Spider Woman, or 2003's Carandiru. Despite the presence of international heart-throb Gael Garcia Bernal, the tortured, sometimes unwittingly laughable story about a professional translator and the three or four women he marries during the course of the film will be a hard if not impossible sell. ThinkFilm International definitely has its work cut out.

The script is filled with so many implausible twists and turns that most audiences will be turned off and the crucial identification with the main characters and their problems will never develop.

Garcia Bernal plays Rimini (an embarrassing homage to Fellini's home town'), a cocaine-sniffing interpreter of French and English who has just decided to separate from his wife of twelve years. We next see him with a young model (Anghileri) whom he marries and has great sex with (until she meets with an untimely end). Then follows a fellow translator and old friend (Celentano) whom he also marries and has great sex with, as well as a child.

Rimini loses his memory for foreign words and is unable to continue to work as a translator or interpreter. He ends up in prison for absurdly complicated and completely unbelievable reasons, loses his wife and child, and becomes a hobo with the standard-issue long, straggly beard. Then, just when he's on the mend (indicated because he starts doing a lot of jogging), comes a woman of a certain age with whom he also has great sex until he realizes that he is just a gigolo to her and destroys her car.

The charitable interpretation of Garcia Bernal's distant and unconvincing, sometimes painfully awkward performance is that this is what his character is supposed to be like, but more likely it's the fault of the script he's constrained by.

Most of the women are unattractively shot, especially compared to the gorgeous Garcia Bernal. This was perhaps an intentional technical device employed to match the intense dislike of women that Babenco demonstrates in this film, an antipathy that culminates in a preposterous woman's solidarity group, in which women are coached in ways to win back lovers who have abandoned them. Rimini 's first wife Sofia (Couceyro) is particularly over-the-top, as she stalks him from beginning to end in a manner that recalls Glenn Close's obsessive behaviour in Fatal Attraction.

With the unappealing characters always kept at arm's length, viewers will struggle to care about their predicaments. We never learn, beyond some faux-philosophical platitudes about the nature of the sexes and the necessity of suffering for love, what makes any of them tick.

Director
Hector Babenco

Production companies
K&S Films (Arg)
HB Filmes (Braz)

International Sales
K&S Films (Arg)
(54-11) 4833 4004

Producers
Oscar Kramer
Hugo Sigman
Hector Babenco

Screenplay
Marta Goes
Hector Babenco

Cinematography
Ricardo Della Rosa

Editing
Gustavo Giani

Main Cast
Gael Garcia Bernal
Analia Couceyro
Moro Anghileri
Ana Celentano
Mimi Ardu

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