Leila Diniz

While the beginning seemed pushing too hard and not very convincing, that first impression changed completely as the film advanced. It is very nice and underrated. It is surprising how it is not often mentioned. Several well known episodes of frenzy life of actress Leila Diniz and many famous people who were her lovers, friends, colleagues, and so for, are represented in the story (Domingos Oliveira, Toquinho, Henrique Martins, Ruy Guerra, Flávio Cavalcanti, and, under a different name, Jece Valadão, among others). Her life was so impressive that the movie sometimes seem fantastic realism. Louise Cardoso has an awesome performance in the leading role, with a lot of charisma and skill, resembling convincingly the very Leila Diniz. Another remarkable issue is that a close friend of hers, Luiz Carlos Lacerda, who directed her last movie, is also the director and writer of this movie about (for) hers, and included himself as a character. Played by Diogo Vilela, the character Luiz Carlos Lacerda shows not only his personal relationship with Leila Diniz, but also his sexuality, his hippie experience and other traits of his intimacy.

In the 60's and beginning of the 70's, the actress Leila Diniz was a muse, a symbol of freedom, scandals and free love in Brazil, a country living a severe military dictatorship in a world of movements of peace and love and changing. This movie highlights her biography, showing some of her many affairs and scandals. But unfortunately the image left by "Leila Diniz", the movie, of Leila Diniz, the woman, is of a promiscuous and alienated woman, without any conscience of the political moment of her country, promoted mainly because of her active sex life with Domingos de Oliveira, Toquinho, Ruy Guerra, and her friendship with Luiz Carlos Lacerda and other men of the Brazilian artistic business. Leila Diniz died very young, in 1972 with twenty-seven years old, in an airplane crash in New Delhi, India. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "Leila Diniz"