Mango Yellow Review
Mango Yellow Feature
{Best Film -- 2003 Tolouse Latin American Film Festival}
{C.I.C.A.E. Award -- Forum of New Cinema, IFF Berlin 2003}
{APCA Trophy -- São Paulo Association of Art Critics Awards 2004}
Wellington (Chico Díaz) is a butcher in a slaughterhouse. His wife, Kika (Dira Paes), is a devout evangelical, given to wearing covered up clothing in a tropical city where skin is casually exposed all around. Wellington values his wife's religious conviction because it assures him of her fidelity, even as he carries on an affair with another woman.
Wellington delivers meat to the seedy Texas Hotel, whose flamboyantly gay cook, Dunga (Matheus Nachtergaele), lusts after the butcher to no avail. Aurora, an older resident of the hotel, is an asthmatic hooked on her oxygen tank, overweight, and terrified of the loneliness she suffers. Nearby, at a cafe, Ligia (Leona Cavalli), the barkeep, flaunts her sexuality even as she fights off the constant physical advances of the scruffy customers. One of those, Isaac, referred to as "the German," is obsessed with death, and buys bodies of newly deceased.
As the intertwined destinies of these "full dimensional people in touch with their explosive feelings" (New York Times) unfold, Assis offers a series of portraits of the people of this neighborhood--women and men, from children to the aged, of every shade of skin color. The hothouse atmosphere of Brazil comes alive in Mango Yellow, where lust and economic desperation combine in a volatile brew of provocative cinema.
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