Jorge Furtado

Isle of Flowers (1989)

André Crous

isle-of-flowersBrazil
4.5*

Director:
Jorge Furtado
Screenwriter:
Jorge Furtado
Directors of Photography:
Roberto Henkin, Sergio Amon

Running time: 13 minutes

Original title: Ilha das flores

This short film appears to be a documentary, but it doesn’t really matter whether the characters are real individuals or not. The very loose storyline follows the journey of a tomato and examines the implications of human intervention while trying to capture exactly what it is that makes us human. The conclusions are rather pessimistic.

Isle of Flowers is set, if such a simple term may be used here, at a tomato plantation in Porto Alegre, where a worker named Suzuki (the recurring, matter-of-fact narrator informs us that he is Japanese) picks the vegetables. These tomatoes will be sold to a supermarket, where Mrs Anete, a perfume saleswoman, will buy them. When she prepares the tomato soup, she deems one of the tomatoes unsuitable and throws it in the garbage. One of Porto Alegre’s garbage dumps is situated on an island called the Isle of Flowers, where pigs and humans vie for a chance to retrieve items from the garbage in order to feed themselves.

The film’s importance lies not in its ability to trace the very banal journey of a tomato from the plantation to the garbage dump, but in its evocative presentation of human desperation at the heart of consumerism. Isle of Flowers uses the red vegetable as a red herring: The film, via many detours, finally deals with the poor of Porto Alegre who have to scavenge for food; they find themselves, in the scheme of things, situated even lower on the socioeconomic ladder than pigs. Everything has a price and can be exchanged for money, as the film clearly indicates, and since a pig can be bought for food, it is worth more than the poor scavengers, who cannot.

The Isle of Flowers, moving as it does from one train of thought to the next, is comical in its apparent digressions but ruthless in its depiction of the lives of human beings. When mentioning Jews, all we see are images of the Holocaust. A human being is defined, for example, as an entity with a highly developed brain and opposable thumbs. These traits are accompanied onscreen by an image of a mushroom cloud (a consequence of the workings of the brain) and the forbidden apple, picked by the opposable thumbs.

My only qualm with the film is its definition of the family as a unit that consists of a father, a mother and two children. While traditionally true, this convention is purely arbitrary and wholly simplistic. But this flaw does nothing to detract from the film’s enlightening and thoroughly entertaining perspective on the impact of exchange.

The Man Who Copied (2003)

André Crous

Brazil
3.5*

Director:
Jorge Furtado
Screenwriter:
Jorge Furtado
Director of Photography:
Alex Sernambi

Running time: 125 minutes

Original title: O homem que copiava

André is a photocopier operator, barely out of his teens, who falls in love with a girl living with her father in the housing block on the other side of the street. He is also a single child living with a single parent – his mother, who spends her evenings in front of the television before shuffling off to bed.

I liked André, and it’s not just because we share a name. He seems genuine, naïve and in love. From time to time, he realises that his prospects don’t seem all that good, but he glimpses bits and pieces of other lives – the lives of the people who come into the shop to have their work photocopied – and wants to work towards a life that provides him with greater opportunities, including the girl, Sylvia.

André makes some impressive illustrations, which we get to see in a handful of animated sequences. But while the film’s first half pulls us in with the main character’s awkward attempts at courtship, the second half loses nearly all credibility with an avalanche of coincidences and a few deaths that easily eliminate the complications resulting from these coincidences.

I wanted to like the film. In the role of André, actor Lázaro Ramos gives a steady performance as a young guy who wants to grow up and leave his impoverished surroundings behind. Although he is much better off than the characters of, say, City of God, he lives with his mother, and his job as a photocopier doesn’t exactly charm the ladies he meets at the nightclub. But the second half, while competently shot and executed, is lazy in its story development and leaves the audience feeling cheated.

Many viewers might find the final reel, in which a secret is revealed that goes a long way towards explaining Sylvia’s tolerance of André’s advances (especially in the early stages when he seems to be stalking her), a bit too romantic at such a late stage of the plot. But while the film is hurt by the incredible sequence of events in its second half, the last 10 minutes are more or less believable and, more importantly, they do represent a state of affairs we want to believe.