The Man Who Copied

Comic strip fantasy and glum working day reality mix in this unusual Brazilian film. André (Lázaro Ramos) works making photocopies at a stationary store, shooting the breeze with his sexy co-worker Marinês (Luana Piovani) and spending his nights drawing comics and spying on neighborhood good girl Sylvia (Leandra Leal). He's too shy and poor to ask Sylvia out, until he hits on the idea of making counterfeit money with the color copier after business hours. Cardoso (Pedro Cardoso), the equally poor, would-be lover of Marinês, helps with the scam. When André realizes Sylvia's loathsome father is spying on her in the shower, he realizes he needs to rob an armored car in order to finance an escape to Rio de Janeiro for the four of them. More windfalls and weirdness develop as romance slowly blossoms between Andre and Sylvia, and Marinês and Cardoso, and blackmail, murder, and other crimes take hold. This film is definitely attention grabbing, and Ramos is great as the shy André, holding fast to audience sympathy and attention with a minimum of sympathetic characterization. Director Jorge Furtado (in his feature film debut) uses the copier motif in some interestingly post-modern ways via the art of Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, the obsessions of Hitchcock (as in REAR WINDOW and VERTIGO) and scenes of childhood depicted by crude animation. He effectively portrays a rarely seen economic class strata--the minimum wage slaves who manage a decent apartment and food, but not much beyond that--then dares to push the envelope even further.

Cartoons | Comic Book | Crime | Fantasy | Murder | Theatrical Release

Genre:

• DVD Foreign Films

Movie Categories:

• DVD Foreign Films: Portuguese

Product Groupings:

• Closed Captioned