Blog From The Bench

One of the earliest films I remember seeing when VHS came into my house was Kiss of the Spider Woman, an excellent movie starring the late Raul Julia and William Hurt about prisoners in a South American prison. As it turns out, the movie was based on a book by an Argentinean author named Manuel Puig (not the guy from Wildboyz). The film Vereda Tropical focuses an a period late in Puig's life, after he was exiled to Brazil from Argentina due to governmental pressure that resulted from his homosexuality. During his time in Brazil, Puig attempts to find happiness, love, and in a larger sense, sanity while in Rio de Janiero.

As Puig, Fabio Aste plays the role excellently (and looks very familiar to Puig), as a man who is almost afraid to reveal how comfortable he is to anyone, and he dyes his hair (to avoid his age, which at the time was after his 50th birthday), and has many friends in Rio who cater to different sides of his personality. He frequently tapes conversations he has with his boyfriends, to capture a realistic tone in his writing. Some resent it openly; others allow it as they are aware of his previous works, but caution him against identifying them in his work. He seems to discover near the end of the film that Brazil has nothing of substance left for him, as the young painter who is in Puig's home to work spurns his romantic advances, and he is assaulted one night for being gay. Puig eventually moved to Mexico, where he died in 1990 at the age of 57 from a heart attack.

The disc I got wasn't too appealing visually; there was a lot of handheld camera work and some shots seemed to come straight from video. The subtitling was slightly inaccurate from time to time, and the English postscript card at the end states that Puig died in 1992. It's hard to tell how the film wants to be recognized. As a biopic, it seems to not even pull from too many factual events in Puig's life, and as a dramatic film, Aste is great, but several of the actors seemed to sleepwalk through their lines. When comparing this film against the excellent Before Night Falls, it's clear that Vereda Tropical is a poor imitation.