The Longing.
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The Longing (Saudade) is being sold as a ‘guilty pleasure, ‘but there’s little pleasure involved and all the guilt belongs to filmmaker Jürgen Brüning, a German who enjoys Brazil and was able to write off a trip by shooting this film there.
His leading men, German Hendrik Scheider and Brazilian Aldri Anunciação, rate high as eye candy but their acting shows why porn stars are usually given minimal dialogue.
Not that The Longing is porno—not even soft-core. There’s considerable foreplay but no sex, and when we see Scheider’s dick it’s neither aroused nor arousing.
Erik (Scheider) is one of a trio of Germans vacationing in Brazil and fooling around in various combinations for their Webcam viewers, whose numbers are understandably declining. Erik meets a local guy but when they try to have sex on the beach they disagree about who’s on top. The trick pulls a knife and accidentally gets stabbed with it.
A few nights later Erik finds a more compatible Brazilian, Miguel (Anunciação), who appears on a telenovela. Their bliss is short-lived when Erik learns Miguel is the brother of his late encounter. He goes through the rest of the movie looking like he’s agonizing over whether to tell Miguel. Or he’s constipated. Or he’s struggling to remember his lines.
Political consciousness is expressed in comments about limited acting roles for Blacks (not much better here, with the great Zezé Motta wasted as Miguel’s mother and Scheider appearing solo on the DVD cover) and at a queer discussion group where the speaker says—three times—’We have to discuss the problems of Black homosexuals in our society,’but doesn’t let anyone else talk.
The Longing proves: 1) cutting between two boring scenes doesn’t make them interesting; 2) bad drag is universal; and 3) a film can have subtitled dialogue without being ‘art.’