"Assunto de Família" or "Family Affair" is a Brazilian Portuguese-language movie from 2011, so this one is approaching its 10th anniversary. It is a definite contender for most known career work by writer and director Caru Alves de Souza as this film has scored a surprisingly big awards attention, which may also be the reason why this film was chosen to be included on the prestigious, long-running gay-themed short film series "Boys on Film", namely the 9th edition. The main character is played by Kauê Telloli, a surprisingly prolific actor to this date despite his age. Here he plays the youngest member of a family and he is watching football early on with his older brother and father and the two brothers quickly start fighting out of nowhere. Okay, you can say that is what brothers do, but even with this approach it did feel pretty staged. Not as staged as the kiss with one of his brother's buddies though. They smoke something together and I already found it stage that they hang out at all, but what happened next did not feel authentic at all by any means and had me reduce the rating even further. Before that it was just an uninteresting film, afterwards it was really fake in my opinion. A bit of a pity as the setting did not feel too bad, or at least not disastrously bad and could have made for an okay little movie. I did not mind the one-position camera early on either. Haneke does that very well, so why not Alves de Souza? The answer is because his work here lacks authenticity and individual creativity from start to finish and sacrifices both for cheap thrills that do not make any sense whatsoever. Highly not recommended. Watch something else instead and I have no clue what awards bodies all over the planet (itÄs not just Brazil by any means) saw in this one.
Review of Family Affair
