O amor natural

A charming film in which the impish Honigmann asks an array of Brazilians to recite erotic poetry by Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–1987), the illustrious polymath—pharmacist, civil servant, journalist, editor, literary critic, and last but not least, poet—from Itabira. In the film, the exquisitely sensuous poems, sparkling with onomatopoeic wordplay and idiosyncratic syntax—and beautifully subtitled here for the non–Portuguese-speaking viewer—act as a window onto the fantastic topography of Brazilian sexuality. After the ad hoc recitals, Honigmann asks questions only an outsider could possibly get away with, to incite her mostly elderly subjects to explore their own memories and fantasies of sexual love. As one widowed samba singer sums things up, Drummond's poems allow you to “feel in your soul what perfect sex is.” Turning to the camera as if it were a magical reincarnation of the great poet himself, she says of her deceased husband, “I killed him with all my fucking, I think.”