Francisco Cavalcanti delivered something close to a trash film knock-out with 1983's RAPISTS OF VIRGIN GIRLS, but this follow-up, one of at least four (!) movies he directed in 1984, left me pretty cold. In Cavalcanti's defense, he's trying something more ambitious here: a period piece that charts a conflict through the decades. Unfortunately, he doesn't quite have the chops to pull it off.
Things start in 1939 - the only clear date marker given by the film - where prostitute Ivone is one of the key earners in sleazy pimp Zelao's stable. When the police raid his brothel one evening, they find Ivone's seven-year-old son in the room and promptly cart him off to an orphanage, deeming her an unfit mother. This set-up is actually very good, presenting a compelling scenario it's easy to get invested in: as poor Nelsinho, Ivone's son, gets forced by the cops to strip and bathe as he stands there crying for his mom, it's clear where the film's sympathies lie. Things don't get better from there, as the orphanage where Nelsinho is dumped serves him gruel full of cockroaches! He ends up banding together with a couple other boys to escape.
Ivone finally convinces the police to give her her son back if she will give up prostitution. She first asks Zelao to marry and make an honest woman of her, but he laughs it off, so Ivone quits the business anyway and sets out solo. But by then it's too late: Nelsinho is already fighting for survival on the streets. He and his friends start out robbing people, and after several years, we next meet Nelsinho breaking up an attempted rape as the other guys begin assaulting their latest mugging victim. In the meantime, a distraught Ivone, betrayed by Zelao and given no help from the police, vows to take her job back on her own terms and use the funds from an independent whorehouse to find her missing child. However, Zelao has no intention of allowing his former chief earner to usurp his business so easily.
Whereas VIRGIN GIRLS, the only other Cavalcanti film I've seen, keeps the plot minimal in order to pile on the sleaze, I was surprised to find IVONE far more ambitious - it's basically trying to be a real movie with some sex scenes added. The problem is, beyond its compelling first act, it doesn't really know what to do with the pieces it has on the table. Ivone largely seems to forget about finding her son, getting distracted by her prostitution business - how else to explain how full decades go by without her ever so much as looking for him? - while poor Nelsinho gets thrown in jail for the crime his compatriots committed and left to rot for the movie's second half. Of course, the crux of the film's conflict is supposed to be between Ivone and Zelao, and the two gradually get older over the runtime, donning progressively more ridiculous makeup that makes them look like they got sprayed with increasingly liberal amounts of that fake snow for Christmas trees. There are eventually a couple murders, but mostly Ivone and Zelao just meet up to scowl at each other. It's hardly a compelling conflict, and the film finds next to nothing to do with it. After 90 minutes had passed, aside from in the opening, I wondered how the film had spent all that time.
The end result isn't calamitous, it's just like a really low-tier attempt at an epic crime drama bereft of direction and with numerous softcore sex scenes added. This conflict between the dual nature of the film's tones - is it a serious melodrama or a sleazy softcore film? - is its biggest misstep. In contrast to RAPISTS, which knew exactly what it was and made zero apologies, the result here is muddled, and highlights how trying to walk a line can simply lead to a muddled and ineffective result.
