Word: bahia
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...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...
...disreputable but endearing group of squatters on the beach--fight with the police, who are trying to evict the good guys from their village, no one gets hurt. The police are easily defeated, and the victors celebrate happily. It is all obviously staged, obviously a joke. Nothing in Bahia is quite real; even the acting is wooden and shallow. It is all a little too painless, too bawdily carefree, for the audience to quite believe...
...world outside Bahia, nothing is quite so perfect; Camus seems to be suggesting that such happiness could not happen here in the real world--where the poor do worry about getting enough to eat, and don't often beat back the police--and that placing a romantically happy ending in realistic surroundings would be as unrealistic as giving us Bahia's complete happiness...
...Camus's Bahia is something like the green world of the second half of A Winter's Tale, where nothing can possibly go wrong--to the point where a woman who has been dead for 25 years comes magically to life. Happiness, Camus seems to be saying, is as mythical as Orpheus, and even less likely to materialize...