"Sixteen-Oh-Sixty"

by Henri Béhar

Starring Antonio Calloni (Vittorio), Maite Proenca (Eleanor), Pedro Brandi (Benjamin), Marcella Cartaxo (Widow), Carlos Meceni (Jackson), Pierre Bittencourt (Jefferson), Fabiano Fabri (Washington), Luan Ferreira (Wilson)

Running time: 87 minutes

The title refers to the 16,060 days wealthy businessman Vittorio reckons he'll have lived by the time he (soon) celebrates his 44th birthday. A tycoon who runs his company with as much humanitarian concern as he would a chain gang Vittorio lives in a palatial villa with his flaky, spaced-out wife Eleanor and their pudgy pig-like brat of a son, Benjamin. When an ill-fated burglar, Jackson, breaks into the house, Vittorio accidentally stabs him, thereby triggering a series of events that will lead him to have Jackson murdered in jail. Alas, the killer strangles the wrong man. In order to clear his conscience, the tycoon decides to offer hospitality to the poor favella-dwelling widow and her three sons, all named after American presidents. As things turn out, the widow is not exactly Madam Weeping Willow, nor are the kids the epitome of aggrieved orphans. As Ionesco might have put it, once you're stuck with it, how do you get rid of it--and who's gonna get rid of whom first?

An absurd-cum-grotesque black comedy pitting Brazil's hyper-rich against its ultra-poor and shot, soap-operalike, in highly stylized sets, "Sixteen-Oh-Sixty" draws a sarcastic, sardonic portrait of a society where human life amounts to near-zilch. There are no heroes nor villains, everybody is revolting. One would have to go all the way back to Ettore Scola's "Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi" ("Mean, Dirty and Vile") to find such an energetic, gleefully macabre image of what we may all be in our wildest nightmares. Don't miss that exhilarating prickster of a movie which, believe it or not (but check the credits), is a family affair!