Jacinto Lucas Pires

Americo Abril is an actor/stay-at-home dad who plays Paul Giamatti in a film where he gets trapped in a video game and, in real life, his mistress is murdered and Abril becomes a suspect, all the while the Euro-crisis in Portugal rages around him with its many protests and political upheavals. I really wanted to like this a lot - it's a big story that Pires manages to tell in a very quiet and subtle way. Unfortunately, for me, it became a little bit of "form before function;" the way of telling got in the way of the story and Abril never made his way into my heart. I know that Pires is also a playwright and had this been a play, the hallucinatory passages and the Kafkaesque meetings with the police would have made for a very exciting evening at the theater, I think. Interesting, but too abstract for my personal taste.… (más)