Product: Foreign Land [VHS] (1995)
Rating: 3.0
3.5 stars, if possible...
I was so wowed by director Walter Salles's work in "The Motorcycle Diaries" (which I watched the night before) that I just had to rush out and rent his earlier work. This was okay, but disappointing -- juvenelia from the future director of "Central Station" and the Che film. It's sort of a caper film: a young Brazilian man, set adrift in the economic chaos of the initial post-dictatorial years of the early 1990s, half-unwittingly takes a job as a "mule" for a diamond smuggler, flying to Lisbon to deliver the package and naturally gets into a world of trouble. The film's most interesting aspects are the presentation of Brazil's political instability and the ironies of a post-colonial Portugal overrun by refugees from Angola and Brazil... The film itself is pretty art-schoolish, shot on super-saturated black-and-white, poorly paced and with a fairly unoriginal plotline. It was okay, but nowhere near as well-crafted as his later work. Interesting, though, to note how fond Salles is of having his characters go on long journeys, over vast streches of the earth... It's his motif, I suppose!