The Man Who Copied (O Homem Que Copiava)
The Brazilian movie renaissance continues with ''The Man Who Copied," a comedy about the conundrums of being young that's as fresh and as stylish as youth itself. As mixed-up, too: What could have been an effervescent 90-minute experience is so in love with the sound of its own voice that it develops genre trouble and piddles on for two-plus hours.
Still, four stars for energy and enthusiasm -- and for having the sort of complicated but unthreatening hero of color of which American movies are still terrified. But race is more of a mixed bag in Brazil than here, and no one comments on Andre's (Lazaro Ramos's) skin color. He's invisible because he's poor and he's young, not because he's black.
Andre lives with his mostly unseen mother in an anonymous high-rise apartment in Porto Allegre, far down the coast from Rio. He works at a copy shop and has a talent for cartooning that doesn't go much beyond his bedroom drawing board. His life is precisely nowhere, with no hope for change.
However. There's a building across the way, and Andre spies on its occupants with a pair of binoculars, zeroing in on the apartment where the young Silvia (Leandra Leal) lives with her father, the latter a nasty, corpulent piece of work in a rusty T-shirt. The blinds reveal only a thin slice of Silvia's life, and the boy projects all his hopes on what he imagines therein.
When he drops into the lingerie shop in which Silvia works, he's tongue-tied. To talk to her, he'll need to buy something; to buy something, he'll need money. Coincidentally, the copy shop has a new color
In a Hollywood movie, this would set the stage for a moral dilemma. Perhaps because Brazil's economy has been in the dumper for years, the movie is wholly on Andre's side as he woos Silvia and moves with cautious incredulity into other areas of shady earning. He picks up a few partners: Marinês (Luana Piovani), a bored hottie who works at the copy shop while waiting for Mr. Rich to turn up; Cardoso (Pedro Cardoso), a raffish little junk dealer with dreams of the good life and a crush on Marinês. At some point, ''The Man Who Copied" morphs into a sun-drenched ''Bonnie and Clyde" and then goes further, becoming a larkish murder thriller.
By then, the movie has drifted, with writer-director Jorge Furtado following his characters instead of his story. A longtime writer in Brazil's film and TV industry, Furtado has only directed shorts before this, and his feature film debut suggests he doesn't know when to quit. Or maybe he doesn't want to: Andre's chatty, mordant voice-over narration drenches the film, like the inner monologue of a kid with a head full of thoughts and no one to tell them to.
Complete with eye-catching animated segments, ''The Man Who Copied" has style to burn, and its anarchic youthful sprawl suggests a South American magical-realist response to early Godard. (The immensely appealing Ramos, by contrast, is a figure out of Truffaut.) Even after it loses its way, the movie suggests a world where anything can happen and no one -- certainly not the girl of one's dreams -- is quite who he or she seems to be. For all his cinematic photocopying, Furtado has come up with an original.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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