As I was watching this dreadful thing I kept shaking my head in disbelief thinking how come a competent director like Guilherme de Almeida Prado
could conceive such an idiotic and pointless film. Sure, "Flor do Desejo" ("Flower of Desire") is one of his earliest films and he didn't have the
artistic hand his other works would provide to audiences. Here, he presents a film that starts off from nothing and goes to nowhere with its story,
those lame and unsympathetic characters and their ways of survival in this world of dangerous and dull people.
The story follows the unusual partnership between a prostitute (Imara Reis) and a cargo loader (Caique Ferreira) who works on the Santos bay.
After both saving the lives of each other in different circumstances they build a business where she sleeps with several men while the man steals the
money from those guys; and then they evolve to a more profitable business where they hire girls as prostitues while they pimp and get the profits and
live in style at the same time they fight the competition from Lady (Tamara Taxman), a woman who has her own business - which is the brothel who gives
name to the movie's title and where the girl used to work.
You probably have seen this story before, it's nothing so original and unique, and it was probably better told in other films or medias. Now this
thing was painful to watch, awful, lame, lazy, cheap, terribly acted and redundant. Not a single scene saved this from being a wreck job. I guess the story
was the least concern from the makers, the idea was to use the plot as background for the countless sex scenes involving Imara and her clients - and there's
plenty of those moments while Caique's character only has one sexual scene that comes at the film's final minutes. The only original bit of this movie
was that the criminal duo don't get involved with each other sexually nor romantic for a long time, it's strictly business.
So here's a waste of celluloid and waste of people's time. I wasn't entertained neither I learned anything from here - well, I maybe I learned
how to not make a terrible film like this, a film without a decent story, without good acting and with nothing new to show. The more I kept going the
worst it got, not to mention the version available was jumpy, with frozen images in terrible quality. Trust me, you can skip this one without regrets
cause there's nothing worth seeing. I jumped on board just to see a familiar name and face from the 1980's of whom I never got the chance to see before
since he died at an early age and didn't have many works available to see which is the young Caique Ferreira. Sadly, this film doesn't provide much of
a chance for him to present himself as a good actor. His character has some good moments - when he saves the girl from the cop who tries to rape her -
but overall it's just a low-life character who went from nowhere, grew up to become important but he'll always be stuck in this same lousy life condition
being a shadow to the intelligent prostitute. 2/10.
