"Sábado" (Saturday) is a great comedy that presents the extraordinary and at times bizarre day in the lives of a group of people inside of a building during the shoot of a TV commercial.
The whole story happens on a Saturday afternoon on a almost decadent building where Magda (Maria Padilha) a producer returning to Brazil, after long travels around the world, to shoot a commercial. In the city of São Paulo she finds the perfect location to film but then everything starts to go wrong: she gets trapped in a elevator with a dead man's corpse and the three guys who want to take him to the coroner; Magda's friend tries to help her and calls 'The Birdman of Alcatraz' (reference from Burt Lancaster's film), the guy who takes care of countless birds and the only one who can repair the elevator; the commercial's director tries to shoot it but the people around him (his crew, the angry building residents, a lady with a dog who thinks her animal will appear in the advertising and many others) will give him some trouble. And the drunk caretaker (Vandi) who does nothing but get more and more drunk avoiding work, not knowing what's happening downstairs.
The film directed by Ugo Giorgetti is simple, funny, entertaining, it only gets critical on the view that he presents us of São Paulo as a confused city filled with thieves (Magda's friend is robbed on the building several times), hungry and disrespectful people (some of the curious who are watching the commercial being filmed are hungry homeless people who simply entered the building), Fellinian's characters and troubles which are quite comical when they're not overreacting or downplayed. As a São Paulo resident I must say that the movie is totally accurate about the city's downtown decadence where many of the ancient and majestous constructions of the 20th Century ended ruined, old, without care, a real shame. That was true back in 1995 and it still true even now on the 21st Century although now this trend seems to be disappearing a little, downtown is more revitalized, there's some good real infrastructure to welcome visitors in cultural events but there's some abandoned buildings and abandoned spaces too.
My disappointment with "Sábado" is that the film doesn't features many exterior images of the city even though the city is referred a lot, that might bother the viewer who wants to know the things about the city, see it how it was in the 1990's. These exterior scenes doesn't appear much because this movie is like a play, with one scenery and we must live in this place, feel suffocated with it just like the characters in the elevator, trying to get out, to breathe.
The movie deals with the absurd and the troubles that many people might have witnessed and that's why the comedy is appealing, charming, very odd. The main characters are well performed by a talented group of actors that includes singer Tom Zé, Otávio Augusto, Décio Pignatari (who is the best on scene playing the Birdman of Alcatraz), Giulia Gam, André Abujamra and Jô Soares in a funny brief appearance as a man who lives in the house of machines of the elevator.
Here's a funny urban chronicle about the problems of a busy world and just when people have a good day to take a rest they need to get up and work for things to get right. And who wants to work on a Saturday afternoon? 10/10.
