Diamantino

Diamantino (2019) is a noteworthy example of a genre that is without honor, a genre maudit, as it were:  the picture is a putative cult movie, manufactured not by popular acclaim or inadvertently by incompetence or on the basis of ambition vastly incongruent to means, the three ways in which movies with "cult" following seem to arise, but rather on the basis of cold, deliberate calculation. The writer-director of this film, Gabriel Abrantis, seems to have conceived the movie to check about every box in the repertoire of cult film:  like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Diamantino features outrageous gay-inflected content, involves transgender or transexual characters and, yet, remains coy about the sexuality of its principal characters.  Like movies by Ed Wood, the picture has a complicated and elaborate plot that requires effects entirely beyond the picture's actual paltry budget -- Diamantino is shot on Super 16 mm; the picture quality is only marginal at best and the movie's special effects are bargain basement quality. (The generally distressed appearance of the film stock suggests Guy Maddin, reputedly an admirer of this picture.)  The acting is campy -- no one seems remotely plausible, not necessarily a bad thing because the story is so remarkably contrived that the mise-en-scene requires caricature of the broadest sort.  And, like most movies, conceived to attract a cult following, the picture backfires badly.  It's painful to watch a film so aggressively downwardly mobile -- the picture's badness isn't original, but plotted as an achievement in reverse.  And, yet, the movie is too self-conscious  to achieve the charm of the sort of naive folly that catapults a picture into cult status.  Further, like many intentionally campy productions, transgression (for instance in films featuring characters in drag) can sour into misanthropy or, more precisely, misogyny.  The female characters in Diamantino are particularly loathsome -- a monstrous lady-scientist in a wheelchair modeled after Bond villains and Dr. Strangelove and two spectacularly "butch" dominatrix-style twin sisters who look like figures from the old Robert Plant video "Addicted to Love".   What might be ironic, and amusing to one sort of hipster may come off as simply cruel and excessive to other viewers.

Diamantino, a hunk of beefcake, is a soccer star who plays most of the film topless.  He's weirdly asexual and childishly innocent.  Perhaps, the greatest soccer player in the world, he triumphs by imagining the football field as a great arena in which giant Pekinese puppies romp in clouds of bright pink fog -- these puppies are his totemic animals and they guide him to greatness in his sport  All is going well for the gorgeous Diamantino until the evening before the World Cup final game -- he plays for Portugal and represents the nation's sporting honor.  While sunbathing on his yacht with his old kindly father and vicious sisters, Diamantino is surveilled by a Lesbian pair of tax revenue investigators who pilot a drone overhead.  (Portuguese "inland revenue" or the IRS, as it were, believes Diamantino is concealing his vast wealth in illegal offshore investments --  in fact, the simpleton soccer player knows nothing about money and it's his greedy sisters who have schemed to evade Portugal's taxes.) Diamantino's yacht, with the drone hovering overhead, comes upon a raft full of half-crazed African immigrants; one of them is a mother who has lost a child, drowned during the crossing.  Diamantino is disturbed by the plight of the refugees and vows that he will adopt one of them.  On the day of the World Cup final game, Diamantino's sisters abuse the soccer player's kindly father, causing him to die.  Somehow, the death of his father befuddles Diamantino (even though he knows about this only telepathically) and his giant Pekinese puppy helpers vanish.  He misses an easy penalty shot and Portugal loses the World Cup.  Diamantino, now a persona non grata, and mourning his father retreats to his enormous chalet, a vast rococo palace with floating balloon T. Rex dinosaurs and allegorical murals painted on the ceilings.  A nun who looks like Sally Field in the TV show "The Flying Nun" brings Diamantino a handsome young man -- this is supposed to be a refugee from Africa that Diamantino has sought to adopt as his own son.  In fact, the teenager is Ayesha, one of the revenue officers, dressed as a boy and given the name Rahim.  (The nun is Ayesha's lesbian lover, the other IRS officer who has been spying on the soccer star).  Although Ayesha is obviously a beautiful young woman, Diamantino takes her for a young man -- he's too sexually innocent to be disturbed when he begins to develop romantic feelngs for him/her.  (There's an unsavory aspect of pedophilia and exploitation to the plot -- is it okay for Diamantino with his melting puppy dog eyes and beautiful abs and naked chest to desire the boy that he is supposed to be helping and who has been entrusted to him as his "son.")  Ayesha/Rahmin is, of course, trying to gather evidence of tax evasion committed by soccer star.

Meanwhile a mad scientist, the bland female Dr. Strangelove, has conceived of a plan to clone the disgraced Diamantino and create an entire team of identical soccer stars   The mad scientist plot develops into a satire on Trumpism -- winning the World Cup for Portugal will "make Portugal Great Again" and the Ministry of Propaganda, financing the plot to clone Diamantino operates vans labeled "Portugal is Not a Small Country", presumably some sort of demented political slogan..  For some reason, this cloning process requires that Diamantino be administered hormones that cause him to sprout shapely female breasts.  Cloning will require a great expenditure of Diamantino's vital stuff, so much of an infusion of his genetic material that the poor fellow will sicken and die.  Just as Dr. Lamborghini, the mad scientist, is about to clone the hero into extinction, Ayesha/Rahmin races to his rescue -- she's now in love with him. (Apparently, Ayesha has been cured of being a Lesbian and, now, has become robustly heterosexual although her object of desire, of course,  has the breasts of a porn-star.)  Diamantino is killed in the fracas.  As he dies, he has a vision of the puppies in their frothy pinkish clouds ascending straight up to heaven.  Heaven turns out to be a spectacular sunset beach where the spirit of Diamantino, complete with his impressive bosom, darts about wholly naked --also sometimes cavorting on a celestial soccer field before a million fans -- before settling down to embrace the gorgeous Ayesha who is a now (more or less) heterosexual.

The film's co-director Daniel Schmidt is apparently a famous footballer himself, although there's nothing convincing about the soccer scenes which are perfunctory at best.  The movie features Wagnerian music on the soundtrack, another "over-the-top" feature in the film, but there are spritely pop tunes and, also, a love aria from Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell.  (Diamantino Matamouras, the hero, is said to be modeled on Rolando Cristiana, a great Portuguese soccer player, sometimes acclaimed to be the best in the world.)  

Diamantino is pretty bad stuff and not as "liberated" as the directors imagine.  In fact, the film is avidly anti-Lesbian, although maybe pro-male homosexual.  The picture is nasty on all accounts and, even as a "shaggy dog" story straining all canons of credibility, it is unintentionally retrograde.  Nice breasts and a cute girlfriend with an equally nice bosom seems to be Diamantino's reward for the idiotic virtue that he so steadfastly displays.  Although the film is full of crude, if impressive, effects -- for instance, the enormous puppies, big as semi-trucks, flouncing around in their pink clouds in the soccer stadium -- there's really much less here than meets the eye.  It's candy-colored whimsy, but not particularly compelling.