A Compadecida (1969)
aka Our Lady of Compassion
Article 5583 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-8-2018
Directed by George Jonas
Featuring Armando Bogus, Antonio Fagundes, Felipe Carone
Country: Brazil
What it is: Comedy

A con man/practical joker plays jokes on everyone he meets.

My plot description is pretty vague, but, given that the copy I found of the film was in Portuguese without English subtitles, it wasn’t easy to figure out. However, certain things do come through. For one thing, though IMDB classifies this as a drama, the general feel of the movie makes me suspect that it’s a comedy, albeit one that gets a little dark at times. It would be nice to know what is going on with some of the practical jokes (one involves a funeral for a dog, I gather), but the only one I was able to appreciate involved tricking an armed invader into believing he can bring people back to life with a harmonica. As to why I’m covering this movie, I’ll only say that final third of the movie involves events in the afterlife. Like many foreign language movies without English subtitles, I can’t really give a full-blooded evaluation of the movie, but I quite liked some of the bits.