EXPRESSIONS OF BRAZIL Rating: NNN
The Expressions Of Brazil festival takes over Harbourfront this weekend (July 16-18), with a film component that offers an overview of contemporary Brazilian cinema. Two features, two documentaries and a selection of animated shorts screen at the Studio Theatre in York Quay Centre over the course of the festival, and admission to all screenings is free.
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Daniel Filho’s If I Were You (screening Friday, 8:30 pm) and Bruno Barreto’s Romeo And Juliet Get Married (Saturday, 4:30 pm) represent the commercial element of the slate.
If I Were You is a 2006 body-switching comedy in which a middle-aged Rio couple (played by Tony Ramos and Glória Pires) go all Freaky Friday on each other’s lives. It’s predictable, but it goes a little further with the bathroom gags than its Hollywood cousins.
And 2005’s Romeo And Juliet Get Married finds journeyman director Barreto (View From The Top, Last Stop 174) trying his hand at screwball comedy in a farce about a soccer coach (Marco Ricca) who pretends to be a fan of a rival team to win his lovely Juliet (Luana Piovani).
The documentaries explore Brazilian music from two very different perspectives. Fernando Grostein Andrade’s Wandering Heart (Saturday, 7:30 pm) profiles singer and guitarist Caetano Veloso, who spearheaded the Afro-Cuban style known as Tropicália in the 1960s, while Bossa Nova In Japan (Sunday, 4 pm) spends an hour looking at the Japanese love of Brazilian bossa nova culture. According to director Alé Braga and the musicians and enthusiasts she interviews in Rio and Tokyo, it’s the combination of technical minimalism and emotional depth that appeals to the Asian ear.
There’s also a program of animated shorts (Sunday, 2 pm) that vary wildly in quality. I quite liked Wasting Earth, a cute little eco lesson brought to life by some clever stick-figure animation by Cassia Mary Itamoto and Celina Kurihara, but getting to it may be more trouble than it’s worth.
All screenings at Harbourfront Centre’s Studio Theatre.
