Futuro Beach

Brazil and Germany jointly submitted "Praia do Futuro" (English captions) to the 2014 Seattle International Film Festival. Directed by Karin Aïnouz, we see shots of Brazil and Berlin as we watch the two motorcycle rides that start and end this film.

The cast:

• Wagner Moura is the handsome Donato, a lifeguard who fails to save a drowning man on a beach in Brazil. I'm guessing this failure causes a personality change, because he becomes distant and alienated from his lover and his family.
• Clemens Schick is Konrad, who invites Donato to come to Berlin with him. Our mustachioed Konrad runs a motorcycle shop in Berlin and sports quite an assortment of tattoos.
• Savio Ygor Ramos and Jesuita Barbosa are the young and later the adult Ayrton, Donato's younger brother. This casting is so perfect I could see immediately who he was the first time he appeared as an adult.

This is touted as "an astonishingly colorful and intimate look" into two very different cultures on two very different continents but we saw very little of those cultures. In fact, I personally saw very little that was colorful, either, and the only intimate look was the forthright sex scenes (expect some nudity). The characters were oddly distant, both from each other (when they weren't having sex) and from us as an audience. I kept waiting for a payoff, but one never came.

I couldn't find anyone to root for, and I find dance clubs to be uniformly boring the world over. Sorry....