In this absurd comedy, when construction workers remodel the Copacabana apartment of a bourgeois couple, they open a "fourth wall" on the family's bizarre hermetic existence. The father is a sentimental reactionary whose social world consists of ghostly comrades, thus he need never get out of his pajamas; his wife is likewise involved with a phantom sexual creation. Two maids are at their service, one a prostitute, the other a mystic who suddenly exhibits stigmata. The couple's two grown kids, boring by comparison, are understandably in search of foreign influences. "A radicalized Night at the Opera," writes Robert Stam. "How many social contradictions can fit into one room-the room being Brazil-without the room exploding?"