Pequeno Dicionário Amoroso

This film was quite successful in Brazil in the end of the 90's but nowadays it has almost been forgotten (although the release of its sequel almost two decades afterwards, in 2015, may change it). Perhaps because it had not enough substance to survive the time test. However, it is not properly a bad movie. Filmmaking is interesting, as there is a nice cinematography, with creative framing, nice solutions for representing thoughts, an interesting mix between events and documentary-like testimonials. Actors are all good ones, and Andréa Beltrão and Daniel Dantas do particularly a good job in the leading roles. They are possibly the greatest responsibles for making the film work, as he dialogs are irregular: if the one hand there are some smart ones, on the other hand most of them are not more than a collection of silly conventional wisdom and sexism. The movie itself is a mix of romantic comedy and romantic drama, perhaps moving from a gender to the other as the story moves from the trial and error of new relationships to the crisis of old ones. Some of the problems posited by characters in their testimonials really match issues couples often deal with, but others are more an oversimplification and a reproduction of sexist ideas of macho and girly distinctive behaviors. Indeed, it has a quite pessimistic screenplay, as it naturalizes an specific path of love relationships in general, which begin mostly as a "crush" and ends with tedious routine and intolerance, basically confirming the diagnosis of there best friends: a statistics enthusiast and a sexist guy who uses to compare men and women with animal life. As relationships are shown as predictably similar and, therefore, are not special at all, their end, although painful, is not a major problem as the same path will start all over again.

I watched this film while in one of my stays in Brazil. The media trumpeting and hyping it as some kind of quintessential and good humoured human study of man and woman relationships. But it was nothing but hyping, the film is one of shallowest films I've ever seen. A few days ago, a Brazilian friend of mine allowed me to lend his DVD of the film ... so, very recently, I watched it twice.

I believe, for basic simple reasons, that the worst element in this film is the script itself.. Actually it's a collage of famous quotations (and who knows what else) concerning the relationship in between man and woman. So yes, my dear reader, the film's entire dialogue smells, and what a terrible stench I had to endure, of academic poseur intellectualism ... And, on top of that, the characters' lines are just unconvincing, to the point of being in need of a heavy language adaptation ... It's a film about love relationships amongst middle-class heterosexual couples ... and the Brazilian middle- class does not talk like that ... besides, the Brazilian middle-class only loves itself in a general mix of contempt and lavish attempts of instrumentation towards the lower classes ... in fact, the film presents a self-portrait of Brazil's middle-class ... better still, how it prefers to paint itself ... no matter how divorced from the way Brazilians really handle their love affairs ... and believe me, Brazilians in general are more creative (most specially the ladies) and sentimental than what the scriptwriter ever cared to even take notice.

Now the main actors. I'm a big fan of Andréa Beltrão ... one of Brazil's natural born funny ladies ... and she's an actress of great talent. The first time I took notice of her skills as a comedian, in a another previous stay in Brazil, she was working in a Brazilian sitcom (sort of) - Armação Ilimitada (which could roughly be translated to 'Scam Unlimited') - playing the role of a reporter working for a newspaper while switching her love preferences in between two adventurous surfers who were buddies and shared the same home. And she was the best thing in that sitcom. But in PDA she's just tied down by the dialogue's obvious artificiality ... in this film, her talents are nothing but a glimpse of her better performances. On the other side, Daniel Dantas has a long history of being a totally untalented actor in a never ending string of Brazilian soap-operas ... and in PDA there he is ... him and his absolute lack of talent. Like in all the soaps he ever worked in, he can't act, he just plays himself ... and does it bluntly I should add.

I gave it a 1 for the effort . And it's definitely a film a would never suggest ... not even for the sake a lightly humoured pastime. Brazil has produced some great films and watching Pequeno Dicionário Amoroso is a total waste of time and money ... rent something else.

That is a good example of a creative screenplay for a Brazilian movie, based not on poverty , ecology or violence. It could be made not only in Brazil, but anywhere. That is about the most favorite theme of Cinema: love. In its perspective, sometimes ironic and hilarious, the idea is that the real life never looks like a fairy tale, but the real love exists. However, the technical conditions, specifically the sound and editing is fair away from Hollywood...

This is one of my all-time favorite movies. I bought the DVD and have watched it many times. It's a universal statement about the pointlessness of human relationships when they're based almost entirely on physical attraction and the "crush" factor, presented in a very clever and often humorous way, although the film definitely has its dark side. The two secondary characters, played by Tony Ramos and Mônica Torres, are very, very funny...Ramos with his macho/pseudo-biological observations and Mônica with her mathematical/statistical obsession.

The music is brilliant, too. Ed Motta has written some lovely things for it, and it's wonderful to hear Nana Caymmi.

Sorry to say, but the previous reviewer missed the point entirely. Not to mention the fact that anyone who has the slightest comprehension of carioca culture would never call the dialog "unconvincing."