BYE BYE BRAZIL Movie Review

A traveling company of entertainers—whose ragged costumes and refusal to throw in the towel can be seen as the very definition of trouper—make their way over the paved and dirt roads of tiny Brazilian towns and villages, putting on shows, collecting what money they can, picking up an occasional hitchhiker, and moving on. The shows themselves aren't much, even for these small-town, generally impoverished audiences who haven't been to Vegas lately, yet the troupe is able to create a genuine, unique magic out of the sheer fabric of their show-business spirits. Creating a neat bit of magic himself, director Carlos Diegues uses his troupe as a kind of metaphor for the way the soul of his country is responding to external change and Americanization, but he pulls it all off so sweetly that Bye Bye Brazil rarely seems rueful or angry. Even a moment in which an entire town is too preoccupied to come to the traveling carnival because they're all entranced by the town's single TV set is more than offset by a more theatrical but less technological wonder: an indoor dusting of fake snowflakes, falling to the accompaniment of der Bingle crooning “White Christmas.” If Americanization is inevitable, Diegues seems to suggest, there's no reason to not get there in style.

NEXT STOP … Quilombo, The Traveling Players, Kings of the Road

1979 115m/C BR Jose Wilker, Betty Faria, Fabio Junior, Zaira Zambello; D: Carlos Diegues; W: Carlos Diegues; M: Chico Buarque. VHS, LV FXL, TPV