I have seen a couple of pix worth my commenting time since I last wrote, but I promised to return to this Brazilian film first. I guess you could describe it as a story about losers who become winners, and not in the most honest of ways, but it was charming and cheerfully immoral in the telling. The hero is a very black young man working as a photocopy operator and living at home with his mother where in his downtime he draws cartoons and spies on the very white girl living with her father across the way. (I should mention here that their different skin colour has absolutely nothing to do with the story). The other two main characters are a sexy girl who works in the same shop and the weasly young "antique dealer" (for this read second-hand goods) who fancies her; she announces that although sexually adventurous, she is saving her virginity for a rich man. In order to meet the girl of his dreams our hero needs money to buy something, supposedly for his mum, in the shop where she works -- so he photocopies a 50 reale note and changes it by buying a lottery ticket.
His friend suggests that he might try this ploy again and they briefly have limited success, but when he decides that he needs real money for his now girlfriend to marry him, he decides to rob a bank van. And then he wins the lottery! All of a sudden people keep coming out of the woodwork to get a piece of the money, but the four protagonists do manage to find their own happy futures. The kicker is at the end when the viewer becomes aware that the sweet young girl who seems the most uptight of the four is in fact every bit as immoral and calculating, but one doesn't think any the less of her or the others because of this. Obviously it all must be some kind of fairy tale; life is seldom this charming.
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