Fortune takes four human beings to the last frontier of passion. There, where love becomes almost inhuman and divine. As if he was a comet, Rafael, the traveler, appears at the party for the cities patron saint, in a small town in the interior of Minas Gerais. He is the one who brings passion and crime, vanishing afterwards, leaving a poetic feeling in the air, which is always deadly to the ones who stay. Mrs. Ana de Lara, the proud rich widow, and Missy, still a child, whose beauty and innocence are like the Tiê-Sangue, a red bird, are the travelers victims. There is also Master Juca do Vale, a criminal, whose passion turns him incredibly human, in this story of love, death, forgiveness and resurrection.
São Paulo, late 30's. Alberto (Paulo César Pereio) is an intellectual and professor who announces to his friend and pupil Polidoro (Nuno Leal Maia) he won a scholarship to study in Paris. In Paris Polidoro receives a letter in which Alberto announces that he married Helena (Ana Maria Nascimento e Silva). Polidoro returns to Brazil in 1945, when there was a strong political agitation against the New State. Alberto invites Polidoro to spend a few days at his home in Campos do Jordão. After reaching the site he is told by Helena that Alberto was forced to travel urgently. She insists he should stay there until the return of her husband and, while waiting, she seduces him. Then, after several days of intense passion, she orders Polidoro to go away and never see her again.
Simeão is a good and simple man but a little too lively for a small city in the middle of Brazil. The most respectable citizens of this town start to think about how they are going to kick him out.
Film in four segments: "Colagem", "Balanço", "Bandeira Zero" and "Sexta-Feira da Paixão, Sábado de Aleluia", having in common a strongly allegorical and gross protest tone in the approach of its subjects.
For his first in a long series of wildly imaginative literary adaptations, dos Santos reinvented Nelson Rodrigues' novel about a pathological gangster with solid gold teeth and a voracious appetite for women and power. Embracing radically modernist narrative techniques, Golden Mouth offers a splintered, refractive portrait of brutal masculinity that returns repeatedly to the same moment from different vantages, each time revealing unexpected perspectives on the brutal yet strangely charming criminal. Lurid and disturbing, Golden Mouth delivers a savage satire of marriage and class pretensions, revealing a similar venality at the corroded heart of the sanctimonious bourgeoisie, the moneyed elite and the working class as they all mercilessly claw their way up and down the rickety and ruthlessly hierarchical Brazilian social ladder. -Harvard Film Archive
