User reviews

The world of the theatre and its artisted has generated masterful and curious portrayals on the screen, from the classics "All About Eve" and "The Dresser", to the hilarious and underrated "Noises Off". They talk about the expectation before the performance in front of audiences, and also dealing with the many personal challenges faced by playwrights, actors and directors trying to balance their personal lives with their professional ones, and to make this fatal combination it can lead to disastrous or hilarious results. Consdering such scenario, "Baixo Gávea" could have a meaty full-course to present its audiences. It could but it didn't, and we all we have left is a disengaging lost film that goes nowhere, or one that ultimately says that personal lives are lost itself because the art is more important.

The friendship of director/playwright Clara (Lucélia Santos) and actress Ana (Louise Cardoso) is an interesting one. They live together, work together and are respectful confidents of one another. While Clara leads an existential crisis of which she cannot have a decent loving relationship with a man, Ana is a little more lucky with her girlfriends but at the same time she's always the one giving advices to Clara about whom to get involved and whom to stay away.

What unites both in a less complicated manner is a play they are working and rehearsing about poet Fernando Pessoa, played by the lead actor Rui (Carlos Gregório).

The rehersals go from good to bad, and the play actually seems a little interesting but it's mostly pretentious re-readings of his works and heteronymous, fantasizing about real life events. As the story progresses, after lousy encounters with weird men, Clara will fall in love with Rui, a married man and a father who might correspond to her wishes but...other things will be on their way.

"Baixo Gávea" doesn't offer us any high conclusion about the state of the art neither any particular reasoning on why those characters and those scenarios are important to be seen on screen. It's a boring picture that artists as drunks, drug addicts, pretentious beings, and creatures who get involved in meaningless relationships, mostly casual things. While there are hints and pranks that Clara and Ana could be lovers, this never happens and it's a sad thing. They know each other so well, understand each other and are supportive of each other yet they move ahead with casual encounters that never mount to anything. And that's left for them and the actors in the play is to make the best performance possible when the play opens, at least the art will survive to a great effect.

Zero thrills and zero humor watching this wreck though Louise Cardoso has a commendable performance as the loud and spirituous member of the group. Lucélia as the neurotic Clara was slightly interesting to follow wheter directing her play or wheter going on crazy dates, being the worst the one with the mad bomber, a memorable special appearance by José Wilker, where the intimacy and care are thrown away and he becomes violent towards her. If back then the scene was taken lightly, as her character just complains afterwards in a not so-shocked manner, these days audiences would have a huge fit about it - and with reason!

The whole experience is boring, claustrophobic and for a movie that has a location in its title more could be explored about such place. It was a huge unfunny mess that I wish I could forget easily. Maybe with time. If there was a curtain call at the end, I wasn't applauding. 3/10.