Cinema Nôvo's "Tropicalist" period had nothing to do with Carmen Miranda, everything to do with the delights and depths of indigenous forms of expression, richly reworked in a modernist sensibility. Macunaíma is the definitive Afro-Brazilian picaresque, an equatorial Candide that "in its jocose examination of the Brazilian psyche fuses symbols, satire, and free fantasy...into a unified fictional universe." (Randal Johnson) Based on a 1929 novel by Mario de Andrade, it tells of a fifty-year-old black newborn who turns white and journeys to the city where, among other adventures, he lives with a beautiful, troubled urban guerrilla and singlehandedly wrestles with capitalist cannibalism (and, implied, with the repression of the post-coup regime). A film that endlessly rewards, but doesn't require, analysis, Macunaíma was Cinema Nôvo's breakthrough commercial film, called in the New York Times, "One of the major works of cinema in this decade. The acting, color, and mise-en-scene are nearly perfect. The sense of life is complex and profound."