Un caldo incontro

A marvellous film. Claustrophobic apartment and all. Braga and Paulo are brilliant. And the film 'is' about the celebration of life. Made during Braga's Brazilian heyday the film is somewhat known for it's explicit sex scenes. It was ahead of it's time considering whats being done as far as sex in films today. Some people may not have grasped this film but it's basically about two people who meet through some circumstances(exchanging phone nos. in a bar actually)and are undergoing a change in their lives. Braga's Maria/Monica masquerades as a hooker but she's not & has a degree in Art History. Paulo has lost his job in a brassiere factory after 37 years because his company sold out to the Americans. Sounds familiar to those of us in the U.S.! But I thought the dark almost undershot cine-photography was right on time & Braga is outstandingly beautiful even in dark photography. Finally the ending is as incongruent as it is wonderful. Braga & Paulo dance a musical duet ala Astaire & Rogers which as the credits roll out signifies the whole essence of this film. Life, despite it's ups & downs, is a celebration!

(**pluses in film: much action takes place in a real Rio apartment which seemed bigger than most peoples' houses. Dig that Proscenium like feature in Paulo's living room. Also great hand held camera shots as well as nice nighttime shots of Rio.)

What no one seems willing to admit is that "Eu Te Amo" qualifies as a XXX-rated hardcore film with almost every ingredient except for clinical close-ups. If this same film were produced in English in the USA or England it would have been tagged as porn and put on the shelf with "Debbie Does Dallas," but it gets a free ride because it is in Portuguese and comes across as "Sonia Does Sao Paolo". There is nothing wrong with raunch as long as it proudly proclaims what it really is, but this "Art Film" is deep down about as artistic as what used to run at The Pussycat Theater. Let the viewer beware.

Very good film about human relationships, loneliness, personal growth and love. At the core here is the importance of human contact to move one's life forward. The film defines love as something different than in a typical love story. In a typical love story lust for another sometimes runs against what is right for one's self. In Eu Te Amo, lust comes out of self-preservation, an instinct to provide for certain emotions, but with the respect for other people's wills. Sexuality and the need to be sexual with another person may not be the only way to achieve self-love, but this film shows that it is the way these two people are attempting to achieve it, and if they end up caring about each other, so much the better. This is an R-rated film and I don't think it is anything beyond that, certainly not X-rated. It is for adults wishing to examine adult situations or for those afraid to enter into a new relationship. Sonia Braga's nude scenes are very appropriate for the story-line, not raunchy, they are important to describe where she is emotionally in the story.

The acting, especially by Sonia Braga, is outstanding… The film is quite sensual, revealing, comic, even at times tragic... A warm, friendly film that takes its time developing its view of the erotic attraction between the sexes…

The story is quite simple, transparent even... A member of the Brazilian upper-class has a bra factory that just went bankrupt and a beautiful blonde wife that just left him… He revels in self-pity in his expensive penthouse apartment… He finally goes out, gets drunk, and ends up in the middle of a lover's angry dispute… He asks the woman in the altercation to come up to his place, and surprisingly she accepts… She pretends to be a whore, and a comic repartee comes as a result, ending in a impudent erotic affair…

For a mainstream film, the sexual encounters are quite graphic, but do not dwell… Instead, the scenes are shot from a distance, rapidly and teasingly, with numerous close-ups of the lovers' faces twisting in ecstasy…

The cinematography is appealing, colorful, and contains a lot of black space for effect… It creates a world filled with shadows and only an occasional bright spot… The bedroom is bathed in golden light

This played in an art cinema near Boston back in 1981. It had an X rating and the critics raved about it. I was 18 at the time and had never seen an X rated film so I decided to see it. I had heard it was a beautiful erotic film about a man and a woman. Well it WAS a film about a man and a woman...but far from beautiful or erotic. Vitually the entire movie takes place in an apartment where the two drone on endlessly about sex and love. The "insights" about sex and such were laughably obvious even to me at 18! None of it was remotely interesting and, after a while, I was fighting to stay awake. And what's with the X rating? There was plenty of female nudity but no male and no explicit sex. This was nothing I hadn't seen before in an R rated film! After it was over I stumbled out of the theater bored out of my mind and cursing (under my breath) every critic who raved about this. This is just an R rated sex film. However, since it's foreign and has endless talk about sex, people must have thought is was a deep meaningful film. They probably didn't understand it and that made them assume it was intelligent. Boring and pretty silly. A 1.