RIO SEX COMEDYOctober 08, 2011
FilmBuff
On Demand Weekly provides new movie reviews of hot movies on demand from the POV of watching from the comfort of your home. Today’s review: RIO SEX COMEDY (FilmBuff).
RIO SEX COMEDY
By Scott Zaretsky
Press notes explain that veteran actors from several countries along with local non-actors semi-improvised their roles in Jonathan Nossiter's RIO SEX COMEDY, which moves from swank high rises and clinics to the dangerous slums of one of the world's most fascinating cities, Rio de Janeiro.
RIO SEX COMEDY has plenty of veteran actors and plenty of seeming improvisation and plenty of Rio - the best thing about the movie - but not much sex and very little comedy. Jonathan Nossiter who wrote and directed this, examines beauty, race, class and sexual attraction, among other themes. Filming it like a documentary mixed with scripted scenes from various POV’s, the film is way too ambitious and very poorly focused, but, somehow kept me in the game. It was filmed in Rio and it did have Sex in the title!
Hope Yet !!!
I waited and waited some more. It's very hard to pin down who the characters are supposed to be since they all act in such erratic manners that keep you questioning yourself – is there something I’m not getting? Maybe, it’s me??? Maybe …it’s the tropical sun's effect on improvisational storytelling and this is truly a new avant-garde reality filmmaking. Maybe this was the plot and device – absolutely GENIOUS!
As I discovered, it wasn’t the case. The cast is indeed top-flight. Bill Pullman plays the U.S. Ambassador as if he were a New York City raised spoiled child sent to live with estranged cousins in Rochester. After a week in Rio, he has no idea why he's there or how to behave. That said …the Ambassador escapes his limo to run into a local favela, one of Rio's hillside slums. Naturally! Nossiter portrays the favela as one big happy and misguided community albeit with gangsters and drug dealers.
Fortunately, the wayward ambassador gets rescued oh so conveniently by Fisher Stevens, who conducts tours of the slums for busloads of tourists. Poverty on parade, now that’s GENIOUS!
The additional plot, one of many I need to remind you, centers on Irene Jacob’s who plays a French filmmaker making a PC film about dark-skinned servants and their roles in Brazilian society. Her husband (Jean-Marie Roulot) who innocently brings his irresponsible and apathetic cameraman-brother (Jerome Kircher) over from France to help shoot her doc dislikes him so for his rude and crass behavior and his inability to focus on her subjects she’s interviewing. It’s only a matter of scenes before they’re bedding one another, as often as they can, whenever they can.
Okay now, stick with me here …! Then there is the ever beautiful Charlotte Rampling's British plastic surgeon, who flees a stultifying marriage to instantly become "Rio's top plastic surgeon." Only she spends her entire time talking people out of going under her knife claiming they’re beautiful inside therefore they’re beautiful outside. Is Rhinoplasty truly the key to happiness?
Newcomer Dani Dams plays an Indian native discovered by Fisher Stevens on one of his Yank tour guides up the Amazon. He falls madly in love with her and imports her whole family to his hillside enclave where she learns English in about five minutes, the value of money and the dream to become a TV soap star as they had satellite TV in the deep of the jungle. I do hope you’re following me here, I would hate to confuse you?
More "madcap" comedy ensues when the Ambassador forms an NGO leaving his Ambassadorship all the while the United States has an All Points Bulletin out for his disappearance which forces him to dress incognito donning hairpiece and beard to take meetings to raise money for his cause.
Why wouldn’t he want to form a not-for-profit since he was so touched by the inhumanity of the slums of the favelas? It’s a novel idea or … social commentary. I might be getting it now. Although “getting it” is really hard to say exactly what the film intends since it really isn't articulate about any of this and heck, I’m still waiting for the sex and comedy., but you can get it now On-DEMAND.
- Scott Zaretsky
Scott Zaretsky is a new contributing writer to On Demand Weekly. While he has played cricket on several occasions and toned his tan while doing so, he sticks to being an independent producer as his vocation of record.
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