Word: smilingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With lots of blusher but no shame, the peacock profession of modeling gives face and body to our covetous dreams, then mocks us as we press our noses against the window glass. What unimaginable delight made the pretty lady swirl and smile as the photographer snapped her picture? What season of debauchery brought the sulky thrust to this beauty's lower lip? At what groveling serf does the fine young lord in the Ferrari scowl with such contempt? Nothing; none; at no one; these glossy apparitions are as hollow as soap bubbles. The photographer has frozen moments that never were...
...Shields, a remarkably handsome tennis star of the '30s, is the accepted source of Brooke's beauty). She often travels with her stepsister and childhood playmate Diana Auchincloss, 17. She moves easily among other teenagers, never seems to play the queen, and signs autographs with a shy smile while nibbling on a candy...
Beyond the exotic cinematic locale and roguish approach, the clearest assets in Bye Bye Brazil are Jose Wilker and Betty Fariah as the veteran troupers. Wilker seems to have only two expressions--an unconvincingly heroic sternness and a wonderfully fatuous smile of beneficence--but he deploys them willingly. He provides a continual comic center to the film with his sly corruption and his charmingly sleazy hokum, often delivered at omnipotent volumes over what one suspects is the only amplifier in the Brazilian backlands. Diegues subtly uses Wilker's ridiculously inept shamming to represent more seriously the modern demand to sell...
...REST of the cast members deliver uniformly fine and funny performances. Charles Grodin, as Pat's plastic husband Vance, has perfected his wimp's smile and slouch; he's made a career of portraying obnoxious sissies. Ned Beatty is appropriately sleazy as Vance's boss, the advertising king who wants to hide the secret of Pat's shrinking because it could cause a "crisis of confidence in American consumerism...
With good reason. Behind his boyish smile, Tyte is one of the crawliest characters in recent fiction. He specializes in making a mockery of privacy. "Make-belief is all we have," he tells another actor, a woman who plays the part of an infant murderer in a television play. Tyte's personal script usually starts with the story that he was orphaned when his parents were killed in a train crash. In truth, Mom and Pop are in a retirement home that Francis never visits. Having eased his way on sympathy, he plays it by ear and keeps...