Carloto Cotta plays a Portugese soccer star with visions of puppies.
We’re all too familiar with political slogans advocating border walls. But would building a border wall make Portugal great again?
That’s one of many comic questions posed in Diamantino, a broad satire from Portugal that won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film screens on March 1 at 7 p.m. in Vilas Hall
The film follows Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta), Portugal’s most popular soccer star. When he’s “in the zone,” he sees the soccer field as a pink cloud with huge fluffy puppies. When he misses a key penalty kick, he loses contact with his puppies, along with his instinct for the game. This failure, and the unexpected passing of his father, drives him to isolate himself in his mansion.
His mean twin sisters, Sonia and Natasha (Anabela and Margarida Moriera), conspire to keep Diamantino’s income flowing while he is off the field. They submit their brother to a series of tests conducted by the mysterious Dr. Lamborghini (Carla Maciel) to discover the secret to his soccer prowess. The funders of the research have interests beyond the soccer field. They produce advertisements to provoke nationalist fervor, which Diamantino appears in, despite not understanding their message.
Add a money-laundering investigation run by two lesbian lovers, one of whom masquerades as an African refugee boy to be adopted by Diamantino, and you have more than enough ingredients for a wacky farce. Diamantino comically fails to understand the world around him, but sports star worship, nationalist politics, profit-driven science, and the surveillance state should not make sense.
Directors Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt deliver an entertaining but never fully satisfying film. Little happens until the last third of the film, when the comic concepts start to pay off. The humor is often funnier in concept than it is in its execution on screen.
The most overt political satire, a slogan spewing anti-EU commercial, is as obvious as a Saturday Night Live cold open. The most audacious images, including the fluffy puppies, seem obscured in a digital haze that temper their visceral and comic impact.
That said, Diamantino directly addresses the consequences of the austerity measures implemented in Portugal in 2010 after the global financial crisis. At a time of genuine political tension, such a charmingly silly film provides much-needed relief.
