Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt | Diamantino / 2018

bosom buddies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt (screenwriters and directors) Diamantino / 2018

 

Attractive, likeable, open-hearted, and dim-witted Portuguese soccer star Diamantino Matamouros (Carloto Cotta) is a fan favorite, surely the only one that can take his team to win the championship. As the crowd roars its approval Diamantino runs the field with what he sees are monstrously large, fluffy dogs instead of opposing and fellow teammates. He negotiates his movements down to kick in the goal among these amazingly harmless beasts who somehow seem to be joining him instead of preventing his final kick. Time and again he saves the day by weaving dog friends through clouds of pink smoke.

    There’s no attempt to explain or find logic for Diamantino’s on-field visions or anything else in his or the other characters’ lives in this somewhat surrealist, sports-based, science-fiction, dramatic, comic detective romance which is precisely what makes this film so very charming and worth watching despite some otherwise predictable maneuvers.

     As in any other sports film, the hero loses his mojo, in this case during the final shot of the FIFA World Cup championship! His fluffy friends disappear and with their absence goes Portugal’s chances to become great again.

     While usually such earth-shattering distractions of major athletes has something to do with a woman, in the naïve virgin Diamantino’s case it is his discovery on a yachting trip that the oceans are full of starving refugees from former Portuguese territories such as Mozambique and Cape Verde, a boat of which he and his father save on a family outing between games.

      Diamantino’s beloved father, coach and manager Chico (Chico Chapas) dies from a stroke soon after, as after his evil twin daughters, Sonia (Anabela Moreira) and Natasha (Margarida Moreira)—Diamantino’s equally beloved sisters—physically harass him for their brother’s loss. Now, as Diamantino’s managers, having the most to lose by his public disgrace, they quickly sign him up with a rightest government program to clone the boy’s talent and create a whole new team of Diamantinos who will help make Portugal the world power it used to be or should have been.

      The only problem is that in the cloning process, which includes hormones, the boy grows female breasts and he will surely die when the doctor attempts to transfer the knowledge in his brain into the other team mates’ bodies. The twins, however, convince their dumb sibling that his meetings with the James Bond-like villain Dr. Lamborghini (Carla Maciel) will help him return to the sport he so loves and stop him from seeing the waves of refugees that now haunt his vision.

     Meanwhile, working for the current government are two lesbian Secret Service agents, Aisha (Cleo Tavares) and Luica (Maria Leite), who are following the soccer player’s every move, electronically and personally for possible money laundering, having noticed the appearance of his name in numerous off-shore accounts. When Diamantino decides to give up football and adopt a refugee son to give him all the love he never had, Aisha decides to dress up in male drag to become his new son Rahim—and so the fun begins.

     Rahim, of course, discovers his new father to be a truly loving man, fawning over him with meals of whipped cream and chocolate Nutella, while Diamantinos cuddles up with his new son every minute he gets to reassure him of a father’s love. Unfortunately, a visit from Aisha’s lover finds the two, “father and son,” in bed together causing all sorts of complications.

      The "boy" also discovers, in the dark of night when the sinister sisters are in bed, that the offshore accounts are not those of Diamantino but of Sonia and Natasha. On their part the twins, while Diamantino is away at Dr. Lamborghini’s clinic, attempt to convert Rahim into their private Cinderella, doomed to scrub and clean the kitchen counters and floors. When their brother returns to discover his new son’s fate, he determines that he will never again let Rahim long out of his sight, bringing the refugee and his new father even closer, a situation that troubles Aisha’s real-life female partner.

     She returns as a nun dressed in high-heels—recalling the nun of Alfred Hitchcock’s early caper The Lady Vanishes and revealing to the observant twins that something is amiss. Eventually they find the nun and the refugee in bed together having hot lesbian sex!

     Aisha as Rahim also has made several discoveries about Dr. Lamborghini and the plans she and the sisters have for Diamantino. As the twins attempt to kill Rahim/Aisha, Diamantino whisks him off to safety on his yacht where they spend a night together, both surprised to find each other has breasts, but also, in the process, introducing Diamantino to sex with a female and Aisha to heterosexual intercourse.

      Love is all set to win the day until the sisters kidnap their brother and return him to the clinic for the final brain transfer, convincing him that Aisha and her lesbian lover have tricked him. What’s a true believer to do but to submit? Fortunately, Aisha is on his trail and kills of the evil sisters before they do her in; but it appears to she has arrived too late for save Diamantino since the doctor has just switched on the current for the transfer.

      The transfer fails, of course, because of the insufficient brain power of our dim-witted champion. But just as he comes to, Lamborghini shoots Aisha it what appears to be a fatal blow. Not to worry, viewers, Diamantino does in the doctor with his trusty saber and pulls his former refugee once more to freedom, escaping—in a vision that begins with a final nude run through the fluffy dog filled stadium—escaping with her to a tropical island where presumably they live happily ever after as bosom buddies.

 

Los Angeles, June 2, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).