COMEDIA DE DEUS / GOD'S COMEDY (47)

Directed by: Joao Cesar Monteiro

Starring: Max Monteiro, Claudia Teixeira

The Pitch: Joao Deus, the elderly proprietor of an ice-cream parlour, spends his days philosophising, creating new ice-cream flavours, and seducing girls.

Theo Sez: Some of the obsessive, self-sufficient texture of THE HAIRDRESSER'S HUSBAND, and some of the puckish, offbeat humour of fellow Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira's THE CONVENT ; but it lasts as long as both those films put together, and you feel every second. The impossibly long, near-static takes are occasionally amusing - especially when they involve our lugubrious hero as the still centre in constantly shifting surroundings - and the goings-on are so bizarre (like a five-minute shot in which a girl lies face-down on a table apparently doing the breaststroke while Deus prances happily around her) that you sometimes have to laugh out loud ; mostly, however, you want to scream in frustration, not least because the point of it all is unclear, to put it kindly. It works best as a study of a comic little man, delighting in his irreverent aphorisms and his collection of what seem to be famous people's pubic hairs, set off beautifully by Monteiro's doleful mien and cadaverous appearance ; and it does occasionally bring off a superb image, notably a swimming-race in which the pool seems to be made entirely of light and the camera moves along with the swimmers (only a fraction slower), so they seem to be trapped in this glorious shining fluid, flailing about but barely moving. Ultimately however its opening dedication to the memory of Cahiers du Cinema scribe - and Steve Erickson fave - Serge Daney epitomises its dry, academic quality (and possibly explains its inclusion in that magazine's 1996 Top Ten) ; would Joel Schumacher ever dedicate one of his movies to a film critic?