O Rei dos Milagres

A young fisherman (Joel Barcellos) receives the visit of a mysterious beautiful woman (Anna Carini) who claims to be death and after claiming his adoptive mother she offers him a deal: he could be a miraculous healer who can cure diseases and even help dying souls who are about to go near death (a time in which she'll be present and guide him on how to help them) and also get lots of wealth because of those acts. However, the pact includes she'll have to be godmother of his child and he can't never leave the countryside to go to the city. Done, solved until he breaks with one of those promises.

"O Rei dos Milagres" ("The King of Miracles") is a peculiar small film about a man's unknown fate where luck always seem to come his way up to a certain point and there isn't much he can do to keep such luck and live in peace. Early in the movie we witness when he was abandoned as a child because he couldn't stop crying during a long journey with his parents. He was found at the next minute of loneliness by a caring woman and when he's finally alone in the world again because of her death, the angel of death comes to him, shows him plenty of good deeds but there's always a prize to be paid. He succeeds as a miracle man for a long time, help and money comes his way and now he has a family of his own and he's faithful to the rules given until the state's governor (Glauber Rocha, dubbed by another actor) daughter gets sick and ruin everything to the healing man.

It's a quite simple movie with plenty of mysticism and magic to show (he can cure a dying man with a glass of water), there are some funny moments but the story takes an awful lot of time to reach to where it needs. Most of the film is a series of miraculous events where the fisherman helps everybody, has some small exchanges with the woman and we keep wondering why on earth he's not allowed to go to the city (she explains it, but it's such a dumb reason it doesn't need to be mentioned here). It's a little sparse at parts and a little confusing when it comes to the man's relationships - I can't tell exactly how many wives he had during his lifetime since there's some passage of time and barely he got widowed he was married again and had a bunch of kids.

Highly entertaining and not much thoughtful though one may have some questionings about the choices one would make if given such burden or prize of healing and follow a certain ruling. Questionings can also be made about the universe interference on the life of a simple man who never managed to get the simple life he wanted yet he succeed it with many things. The film isn't deep enough with such issues, but audiences can surely find the ways to make those questionings very deep within.

7/10.