Monday, June 19, 5:45 pm, Roxie + streaming encore
🌎 North American première
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| Casa Izabel |
First, two bits of useful backstory not in the film itself: One, Brazil was under a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, and two, this fictional story is loosely inspired by the true story of Casa Susanna as depicted in a documentary in this festival.
Casa Izabel is set in 1970, somewhere in the Brazilian countryside. A group of men gather to dress up and take on the personae of glamorous women, with the solemn promise to leave the outside world (and their outside identities) at the door. The founder of the retreat, Izabel, is a semi-invalid, holed up in her quarters watching home movies of previous years’ get-togethers. But some melodrama is afoot, with suspicions rising even faster than the missing persons list. Is there an infiltrator among the guests? What happened to the cook’s (other) son?
There are some fun parts of this movie, but on the whole “pulpy period melodrama” really isn’t my schtick, and I wasn’t terribly impressed by the mystery angle in the story. Still, if you like that kind of thing, you may enjoy Casa Izabel, but I can’t really recommend it for general audiences. I give it a “meh.”
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