Brazilian soccer star Heleno de Freitas, whose career heyday was in the 1940s, was revered for the grace of his scoring, for which he often used his chest. But you wouldn’t know that from this film. I had to look it up.
Brazilian director José Henrique Fonseca may be counting on his audience’s prior knowledge, but reducing the career to a few rainy scenes where the camera fixates on Heleno’s scowl doesn’t exactly argue for the player’s greatness. It’s mostly Heleno (Rodrigo Santoro) off-field, and he’s no hero — arrogant, womanizing, violent and addicted to something he whiffs off a cloth (ether; I had to look that up, too).
What you get instead of soccer is almost two hours of late-stage syphilis. Heleno refuses treatment, fearing the medicine will make him “go soft,” and the movie jumps frequently to his pathetic last days in a mental institution. The many sex scenes thus are queasy viewing.
The re-created Brazil of the 1940s looks stunning in black and white, and indeed this film’s structure and technique owe Martin Scorsese’s “Raging Bull” the equivalent of the national debt. But unlike that great film about the cost of male violence, this one doesn’t link Heleno to anything other than his own sad end.