Tony Ramos (pictured above) plays a detective investigating the case of a Brazilian landowner who dies shortly after taking out a life insurance policy worth a million dollars. The 2001 film is based on Rubem Fonseca's 1990 Bufo & Spallanzani (the film carries the same title), one of craziest novels you're likely to run across.
I LOVED Rubem Fonseca's High Art and I also gobbled up Bufo and Spallanzani. Likewise, two of my literary Goodreads friends, João Reis and Cymru Roberts, are huge fans of the author. Rubem Fonseca (1925-2020) is surely one of the greatest Brazilian novelists and can be counted among the giants of Latin American literature. If you haven't read him, you're missing out.
Bufo and Spallanzani - a novel with a story, actually multiple stories, too good to be believed. How good? Not for me to reveal arc of plot, actually arc of multiple plots, thus I'll make a quick cut to a trailer -
Bufo -A genus of toads in the amphibian family Bufonidae that secrets a substance considered anything from poison to magical medicine. When it comes to this Rubem Fonseca novel, a bounty of Bufo bounce into a bevy of tales to play their bits.
Spallanzani - A figure from history, human that is. You'll have to read the novel to discover exactly who. Not my place as reviewer to give away too much.
Death of a Beauty - On the opening pages we learn gorgeous Delfina Delamare has been discovered dead at the wheel of her Mercedes on a back street in Rio. Suicide? Murder? And to think, her husband is one of the wealthiest men in all of Brazil.
Elegant Maitê Proença plays the part of Delfina Delamare in the film
Novelist - The entire tale is told in the first-person by an accomplished Brazilian author who, by his own admission, is a satyr, a man obsessed with women, a man with an enormous, unquenchable sexual appetite. He also admits to being a glutton (a novel with more detail relating to finely prepared dishes you will not find). He has taken on a pseudonym: Gustavo Flávio (yes, of course, the Portuguese for Gustave Flaubert).
Hip Honey - "She was dressed like an old-style hippie - long skirt, hair standing on end, sandals, cloth purse - and she had a delightful smell of underarm.
"My name is Minolta."
The film features stunning Isabel Guéron as poet Minolta
Detective, One - The cop (using the language of Gustavo Flávio) on the Delfina Delamare case turns out to be an unprepossessing guy with his crumpled suit who shares much in common with Peter Falk of Columbo fame.
Detective, Two - The picture at the top is Tony Ramos playing Ivan Canabrava, an investigator for Panamerican Life Insurance. Who would think Ivan's conventional, colorless life would start to transform (or unravel, according to his girlfriend Zilda) beginning with that time when he watched the three witches during a production of Shakespeare's Macbeth?
Forest Resort -One entire section of the novel takes place at a remote Brazilian retreat center where Gustavo Flávio mingles with a number of flamboyant women and men having their own artistic expressions and eccentricities.
Blockbuster - When Bufo & Spallanzani first published in Brazil back in 1990, it quickly became a bestseller. Hey, with all the sex and violence and more sex and violence, what's there not to like? Besides which, Rubem Fonseca possesses a unique ability to create interlacing plots that will keep any reader turning those pages. Once I started this novel, I could hardly put the book down - the story is that compelling. I hope my review prompts you to considering giving this Brazilian literary work a go.
"A toad! My God, a toad! Zilda, the son of a bitch brought home a toad!"
Brazilian author Rubem Fonseca, 1925-2020
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