Meticulous character study of a homely, uneducated, nineteen-year-old virgin from the Brazilian Northeast, working now as a below-minimum-wage typist in São Paolo ("She wouldn't take the job if she were smart"), and an awfully slow and sloppy typist at that. The details are as excruciating as they are convincing: her diet of hot dogs and Cokes (guava paste and cheese are a rare treat); her weekend joyrides on the subway (the hairy armpit of a strap-hanger constitutes her closest encounter with sex); her devoted attention to a radio trivia program from which she learns, for an example, that Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland and invented algebra -- only she doesn't know what algebra is, and has to turn to her new boyfriend for enlightenment ("That's for faggots"). There are many brushes with mawkishness, but never a head-on collision: it is touching, in other words, without ever being mangling. Very professionally made, on a small budget and a four-week shooting schedule, by a fifty-two-year-old mother of nine, Suzana Amaral: it's her first film. With Marcelia Cartaxo. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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