A Pantera Nua

Don't waste your time! Awful screenplay, bad acting,... Absolutely ridiculous!

Funny comedy from 70's Brazilian softcore cinema. I expected a much worse film but there are nice moments in this comedy of manners (dated, for sure, but a good mockery on Rio de Janeiro middle and upper classes society). The film worsens as it advances, but it is still not bad. In the very beginning, the magazine issue is particularly hilarious: Amândio as the Italian-Brazilian conservative white-collar father of Rosana Ghessa is the best in the movie. Filmed in Rio de Janeiro downtown, Ipanema and Copacabana (besides Paraguay!?), the movie shows several times the rivalry with São Paulo. More important thant this, all roads lead to marriages of convenience, and to naked people.

Norma (Rossana Guessa) is a low middle class young woman trying to find a rich husband to have comfortable life. She poses naked for a men magazine expecting to be known in the upper class. She engages the gay Marcelinho, who is imposed by his father to get married to have the right to his inheritance, but when Marcelinho's father dies, he calls their deal off. Meanwhile, Norma meets the opportunist and gigolo Lincoln (Roberto Pirillo), who pretends to be a tycoon farmer, and they have a torrid affair. But Lincoln believes she is a rich woman from a wealthy family and he intends to marry her to have money.

"A Pantera Nua" is a silly and amoral story, very dated in the present days, where every situation is a pretext for the hot Rossana Guessa to take her clothes off. She spends most of the film completely naked, as promised in the title of this flick. This DVD, recently released by the Brazilian distributor "Cinemagia", has a remark on its cover that it is "Digitally Remasterized". However, it is almost impossible to understand the dialogs, so bad the sound is. The trembling image is also terrible, hurting the eyes. In the end, only the naked body of Rossana Guessa makes this terrible DVD worthy. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "A Pantera Nua" ("The Naked Panther" – in the 70's and 80's, "pantera" was a slang for a very hot woman).