Word: bahia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Camus could have done the same thing in Bahia, his sixth film since Orpheus. Like Orpheus, Bahia takes a rather simple story, sets it in Brazil with beautiful camerawork, music and color. But the main story is a comedy, ending in marriage instead of death; it is complicated by subplots, colorful but distracting; and its climax does not have the heart-wrenching power of the Orpheus myth. In the end, Bahia is a very pretty, very joyous movie, but it is not a masterpiece...
...Bahia revolves--more or less--around the tale of two lovers. Otelia, a beautiful young girl (Mira Fonesca), comes to Bahia, a spectacularly beautiful area on the Brazilian coast, to work in a brothel. There she meets Martim (Antonio Pitanga), a handsome young member of Bahia's cheerfully disreputable fringe element. By the end of the movie, her simple adulation--she is young enough to clutch a rag doll to her--has won him over from the wiles of more sophisticated women. And so the two are married, surrounded by their friends...
Camus presents the characters in Bahia as "God's poor--that is, they are completely poverty-stricken, but rich in friends." They live in a squatter village near the beach, outside the normal realm of the world. They are always happy: always dancing, never hungry, never worried about what tomorrow will bring. This is a myth, after all; if Curio (Paco Sanches)--who wears a clown's makeup and sighs constantly after blondes--is slightly unbelievable, well, so is every other character in Bahia...
...Bahia. At the Orson Welles Two, daily...
...course we're not. And nowhere are you more painfully aware of the fact than in reading this cover story The Magic of Brazil. Oh yes. Magic country. Beautiful country. And the excerpts printed here from Jim Metsner's Bahia portfolio of photos and recordings of traditional Brazilian culture and music help bring some of this 6,000 miles-away richness to the most insular Cambridge dweller...