A wildcat of a film guaranteed to shock even jaded viewers, Claudio Assis' debut feature Mango Yellow is a provocative tale of low-rent losers set in the coastal town of Recife, Brazil. Like characters out of some Carnival hell, a macho butcher and his born-again wife, a forlorn barmaid, a sinister sadist and the gay manager of a flophouse called the Hotel Texas run in and out of each other's lives as sloppy, sluttish, scruffy and vital as they are.
Like a practiced barman, Assis mixes and stirs his characters around in their slummy but familiar surroundings. He gets much closer to them than most other Brazilian filmmakers thanks to top Brazilian lens man, Walter Carvalho's ("Central Station") revealing wide-screen shots of Recife's shanty towns. Here the people relate strictly to each other in their futile grasp for boundless but meaningless freedom and their unrelenting pursuit of hedonism.
Mango Yellow is both the jaundiced shade of their broken dreams and the color of nonconformity and feeling alive. |
